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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28959255">smoke in every lane</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/fireinmywoods/pseuds/fireinmywoods'>fireinmywoods</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>smoke in every lane verse [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>M/M</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-04-24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 06:15:28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>88,294</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28959255</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/fireinmywoods/pseuds/fireinmywoods</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>The announcement doesn’t last long, and Leonard only catches a bit of what Spock’s saying – enough to gather that things apparently went sideways down on Xulos and the away team has been beamed back ahead of schedule.</i>
</p><p><i>For the sake of his already anxious patient, Leonard resists the urge to roll his eyes. When do things </i>not<i> go sideways on planets starting with an X, that’s what he wants to know.</i></p><p>When a diplomatic mission goes to hell on some stormy backwater of a non-Federation planet, Leonard is left searching for answers.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>James T. Kirk/Leonard "Bones" McCoy</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>smoke in every lane verse [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2277800</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>627</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>216</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Hello, friends! Long time no see, and man, have we been <i>through it</i> in the interim. I hope that you are doing as well as you, personally, can be doing right now. Drink some water before we start, would you please? Unslouch your shoulders. Give yourself a little neck massage. You’re worth taking care of.</p><p>This fic has been finished on my end, and new chapters will be posted every weekend until it’s complete. I highly recommend reading along as chapters are posted, since the story is quite episodic, but if that’s not your bag, you can subscribe or follow the story tag on Tumblr and I’ll see y’all again once the final chapter is posted.</p><p>IMPORTANT: Please note that I have chosen not to use archive warnings. My reason for doing so is pretty tame and should become evident within the first few chapters, and I will include other content warnings as needed on a chapter-by-chapter basis. For Chapter 1, I'm warning for language and references to injury and gross medical stuff.</p><p>And remember, y’all: I believe in happy endings.</p>
    </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p><b>4/24/21 edit:</b> Hello, new readers! Today is the first day it will be possible to read this whole story from start to finish all at once, and so I wanted to pop back in to Chapter 1 to advise you to <i>not do that</i>. I mean, it’s your life. I’m not the boss of you. And I get that you may like to read a story in one go, that in fact you may have been waiting for this fic to be completed so you could do just that. I’m that kind of reader too! And still, I’m strongly recommending that you give yourself a break between chapters. An hour, even, if you can’t manage a day (or the week my poor valiant WIP readers had to suffer). This is a highly episodic, often very heavy story, and I’ve now heard from multiple readers that the reading experience is in fact more satisfying with a little time between chapters, giving each episode some room to breathe and settle. Again, it’s ultimately up to you, and whatever you decide, I am SO happy you’re here and preparing to give this story a chance. I hope you enjoy it!</p><p>OH, and I should add: for those of you embarking on a reread, I would LOVE to hear from you - just please keep spoiler comments contained to Chapter 13, since a lot of new readers will read over the existing comments on each chapter! Please and thank you kindly.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The first sign that something’s wrong comes just after the start of beta shift.</p><p>Leonard is in the Jeffersons’ quarters for his check-up with Kiara, who’s been on strict bedrest for the past week with preeclampsia. She’s a little over 35 weeks now; Leonard’s hoping to get her to 37 before they have to deliver.</p><p>He’s listening to the fetal heart rate when he distantly notices Spock’s voice coming over the ship’s PA system. He’s absorbed in his work, and it takes him a minute to realize why that seems off: Spock is supposed to be planetside right now. The away team beamed down around 0600 hours ship time, and they weren’t due back until at least 1800.</p><p>Then again, Leonard has been swamped ever since he came on duty this morning. It would’ve been easy enough to miss a change of plans.</p><p>The announcement doesn’t last long, and Leonard’s still assessing the heart rate (good and steady, about 140 bpm), so he only catches a bit of what Spock’s saying – enough to gather that things apparently went sideways down on Xulos and the away team has been beamed back ahead of schedule.</p><p>For the sake of his already anxious patient, Leonard resists the urge to roll his eyes. When do things <i>not</i> go sideways on planets starting with an X, that’s what he wants to know. Jim can call him superstitious all he likes, but Leonard would bet two months’ water credits that the evidence is right there in both the captain’s log and the med record database. Leonard’s not the crazy one here. No, what’s crazy is ignoring a firmly established precedent, picking up a ticking time bomb with both hands and acting surprised when it blows up in your face.</p><p>In any case, the situation can’t be too dire, as he hasn’t been paged, so he doesn’t rush through finishing up with Ensign Jefferson. He checks her liver enzymes one last time, reminds her again to keep taking her supplements and comm him directly at the first sign of bleeding, vision problems, or seizure, and then makes his way back to the medbay to see what kind of foolishness the away team have gotten themselves into this time.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>Happily, his first glance around the bay suggests that the fallout from this particular fuck-up isn’t all that bad. It seems to be relatively trivial injuries for the most part: minor burns, some scrapes and lacerations, a couple sprains. The injured crew resemble nothing more than a bunch of unhappy kids come in from the rain, dripping wet and shivering, thick black mud caked onto their boots and spattered halfway up their legs.</p><p>Leonard grimaces at the pools of dirty water spreading across the floor. That’s another few twisted ankles just waiting to happen.</p><p>He directs an orderly to start cleaning up and heads over to the environmental control pad, where he punches in his override code and boosts the ambient temperature by a couple degrees for the next hour. It’s not a call he’d normally make – the bay is kept within precise SFM-mandated parameters for temperature, humidity, and gas balance for a reason, and if Jim finds out about this he’ll never hear the end of it – but the crew looks miserable, shuddering and teeth-chattery, and he’s not totally heartless.</p><p>That done, he makes his way toward Christine, who seems to have everything well in hand despite looking somewhat worse for wear herself, soaked through like the rest of them, the back of her left hand torn-up and bloody. She’s busy with a patient, cutting away a hunk of bedraggled sleeve to get at the broken skin along their forearm, an osteo cuff already humming around their wrist. She won’t appreciate being interrupted, and Leonard’s not fool enough to get on her bad side without damned good reason. He chooses instead to take the opportunity to run his scanner over her while she’s distracted, checking for abnormalities – tachycardia, unusual hormonal fluctuations, changes in bone density, any of that bizarro shit which so often accompanies a souvenir from the latest alien world the crew’s been bumbling around on – and thinks to himself a touch sourly that this is absolutely the last goddamn time he lets Jim send his best nurse on a mission. <i>Especially</i> to a planet starting with an X.</p><p>Luckily for Jim, Christine’s vitals are all within acceptable ranges and there’s no sign of internal injury. Leonard relaxes a bit, lets her finish up with her patient before he alerts her to his presence with a light touch at her elbow.</p><p>“Let me fix that hand up for you,” he says, reaching around her for the dermal regen on her tray. “Can’t have you bleeding all over your patients, can we?”</p><p>Christine turns sharply, visibly surprised to see Leonard beside her. She must have been more distracted than he realized. “Doctor. You’re here.” </p><p>Leonard cocks an eyebrow at her. “Where else would I be? You know the drill. Crew get themselves into some mishap or another and come crawling in here looking for us to save them from their idiocy. All hands on deck.” He lightly braces his fingertips under Christine’s palm to steady her hand for the regen. “Jesus, your skin’s like ice. I kicked the ambient temp up a notch, so that should help. Just don’t tell Kirk, would you? You know he’s always bitching about how cold it is in here.” He tilts her hand, inspecting the damage. “You’d think as often as he’s here he’d have learned by now that this is a clinical space, not a damned luxury resort suite. Next thing he’ll be petitioning for feather mattresses and daily spa treatments.”</p><p>“Doctor,” Christine says again, and there’s something in the way she says it that gives Leonard pause, a note of urgency not warranted by the minor injuries he’s seeing around him. “They didn’t tell you.”</p><p>Leonard looks up from her hand, an all too familiar spark of unease catching low in his belly. “Tell me what?”</p><p>“The captain is still on-planet,” Christine says. “We got separated leaving the audience hall, and he didn’t meet us at the beam-out point. He’s…he was stabbed in the attack.”</p><p>Leonard stares at her, uncomprehending. She must have misspoken, or else he heard her wrong. What he <i>thought</i> he heard doesn’t make any sense, because Jim was never on Xulos in the first place. He decided to send Spock to lead the mission. He was joking about it just last night, saying it was Spock’s turn to tromp around in the rain after he and Chekov practically had to swim to and from the beam-out point a few weeks ago on Kappa II. Leonard even kinda pushed back on it, questioning the wisdom of pinning their hopes for a diplomatic mission on Spock’s ability to play nice, and Jim smirked at him, tapped his queen against the board all thoughtful-like and said that was a good point – Leonard should probably go along too to help smooth things over.</p><p>“Doctor?” Christine says, in a tone that suggests she might’ve said it a couple times now.</p><p>Leonard shakes his head forcefully, a countershock to disrupt that little stutter of dysrhythmia. “Where?” It comes out hoarse, and he clears his throat. “Where’s the wound?”</p><p>“Right lower quadrant. It looked to be a flank injury, entering about here – ” Christine places her scraped hand on her own side, just above her hipbone. “ – but I wasn’t able to get a good enough look to say for sure. There may have been more than one.”</p><p>Leonard’s thoughts are racing, running over the possibilities. In the short term, the right flank isn’t the absolute worst spot for an abdominal stab wound, but depending on the path of penetration, there could be traumatic injury to the kidney, or, worse, bowel perforation, and from there it’s a quick jump to peritonitis and sepsis. Of course, that’s if the blood loss doesn’t get him first, and if there are multiple wounds –</p><p>“And that’s the last you saw of him?” he asks over his shoulder, sliding open a cabinet to retrieve his critical care medkit – the one Jim calls his <i>we fucked up</i> kit, loaded with protoplasers and regens and vacuum splints and Jim-friendly hypo vials. “Right after the – incident?”</p><p>“I spoke to him by comm about ten minutes later,” Christine says. “He was fully coherent and still mobile. Some shortness of breath, but not pronounced. He wouldn’t answer questions about his status. He just said to get back to the beam-out point, that he’d circle around and meet us there.”</p><p>Of course he did. “Best guess at his condition as of that communication?”</p><p>“Critical but stable,” Christine says. “He was still on his feet the last we heard from him. On the move. You know Kirk.”</p><p>That he does. Adrenaline is a hell of a drug, and Jim’s is especially potent. Over the years, it’s powered him through any number of impossible feats: running on a broken ankle, hauling himself up a rope ladder with burned, blistering hands, supporting his entire body weight on a badly dislocated shoulder.</p><p>But there’s a price to pay, always. After the immediate danger has passed, when he finally crashes – that’s when that shimmery veil of heroism lifts to reveal the ugly reality of all the goddamn damage he’s done to himself by forcing his body past its natural limits.</p><p>Leonard hauls the medkit strap over his shoulder, grabs an extra vial of cortolin, and takes off for the bridge.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>The bridge is buzzing when he arrives, loud and hectic with that particular strain of hyper-efficient chaos which tells him the situation is at least as bad as he feared, if not worse.</p><p>He heads straight for Spock, who’s standing with Sulu at the helm, splitting his attention between some complicated diagram up on the main viewscreen and the smaller displays on the navigation console.</p><p>“Where is he?” Leonard growls.</p><p>Spock glances sideways at him, then back to the screens. “I do not have an answer you will find satisfactory, Doctor. Our sensors are currently unable to detect the captain’s biosignature despite repeated sweeps of the terrain.” He indicates the diagram on the viewscreen, which Leonard now realizes must be some sort of topographical map, twisted and skewed at an odd angle. Spock adjusts a control on the nav console, and the map rotates, allowing them to “see” down into a narrow, snaking division between the two hulking blue masses that dominate the map. There’s a yellow dot tucked in there, a little blinking point of light. “His last communication with the away team was traced to the Mingari ravine, approximately point nine kilometers from the site of the attack. If we assume that he is still on foot and that he has continued to travel at the same speed, he could be anywhere within a four-kilometer radius of this point. However, the search area increases exponentially if we consider that he may have found an alternative mode of transportation.”</p><p>That’s hardly a throwaway consideration where Jim’s concerned. The kid does have a baffling knack for scrounging up a ride when he really needs one – a trait he prefers to describe as <i>resourcefulness</i>, though Leonard suspects it has just as much to do with his impressive record of youthful delinquency. Semantics aside, he won’t be the least surprised if it turns out Jim has hotwired some rusty old junker he found buried in the mud or stolen one of the rebels’ crafts right out from under them – which means that, as Spock implied, there’s no telling how much distance he could have covered by now.</p><p>Leonard eyes the pulsing yellow dot on the screen, wishing not for the first time that he could just implant some kind of remotely activated return-to-sender chip in Jim’s arm and be done with it. “When’s the last we heard from him?”</p><p>“He has not made contact in – ” Spock’s gaze flicks briefly to a display. “ – sixty-two minutes. It is not clear whether this interruption in communication is due to his being otherwise occupied or incapacitated, or whether it solely attributable to the ongoing electrostatic discharges in the planet’s atmosphere, which have been interfering with our scans and with Lieutenant Uhura’s attempts to restore communication.”</p><p>Electrostatic – ? Leonard is about to ask when the viewscreen is suddenly backlit by a flare of purplish light, briefly whiting out the projected displays.</p><p>Oh.</p><p>Leonard steps toward the viewscreen and looks down to find a foreboding dark mass of stormclouds not far below the ship, stretched out dense and simmering in every direction as far as the eye can see and crackling all over with jagged, branching streaks of pink-violet light – now here, now there, erratic and unpredictable. Like different parts of a massive spiderweb being lit up one intricately woven patch at a time.</p><p>Yeah, he can see how that might throw a wrench in things.</p><p>When he turns back around, Spock has moved from the helm to the command chair and is tapping a button on the arm. “Lieutenant Karimova, report.”</p><p>
  <i>“Still no sign of him, Commander.”</i>
</p><p>“We are still experiencing electromagnetic interference?”</p><p>
  <i>“Aye, sir, but EM focusing is a secondary concern at this point. Even during periods of low intercloud activity, the scanners aren’t detecting a bio-sign within the designated perimeter. The terrain and unusual gravitational variation present additional challenges, of course. If we could get an updated coordinate map with grav comp adjustments to expand the search area – ”</i>
</p><p>“Almost, almost,” Chekov says, typing furiously at a screen already crowded with a mess of numbers and calculations Leonard couldn’t begin to make sense of.</p><p>Spock turns his attention to the communications station, where Uhura is a study in single-minded focus. “Lieutenant Uhura, have you been able to reestablish contact?”</p><p>Uhura gives a single sharp jerk of her head. “Not yet, sir. The channel is open on our end, but we’re not receiving anything from the captain’s comm. I’m still working to identify the problem.”</p><p>“There!” Chekov says triumphantly. A new map pops up on the main viewscreen, much larger than its predecessor, still with that little yellow dot blinking away at its center.</p><p>“Excellent work, Mr. Chekov,” Spock says. “Send it directly to Transport and Lieutenant Uhura.”</p><p>“Aye, Commander.”</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>The expanded map breathes new energy into the crew’s efforts, but that optimism begins to fade as minutes tick away with no apparent progress on any front despite the humming frenzy of activity across the bridge. Ten minutes on, they still haven’t managed to locate Jim’s signal, and his comm channel remains silent.</p><p>Spock comms Transport again to check in on their progress, but before he can say anything, they all hear, <i>“Enterprise to Kirk.”</i> It’s Scotty’s voice now coming over the channel, breathless and loud. Leonard can imagine him sprinting through the warren of corridors between Engineering and the transporter room, shooing Karimova away with urgent flaps of his hands so he can take her place at the console. <i>“We’re trying to lock onto your signal, Captain. Do you copy?”</i></p><p>Silence. At the comms station, Uhura’s hands are flying over her console, flipping switches, tapping and swiping at half a dozen different screens.</p><p><i>“Enterprise to Kirk,”</i> Scotty repeats. <i>“Do you copy? Captain? … Captain?”</i> And then, quieter: <i>“Go on, Jim, where the hell are you?”</i></p><p>Nothing.</p><p>“Mr. Scott, report,” Spock says at last – redundantly, in Leonard’s opinion, as it’s pretty damn clear to all of them what Scotty’s going to say.</p><p><i>“We’ve run two comprehensive scans of the search area, sir, and the captain’s not turned up on either of them,”</i> Scotty says grimly, all his usual cheer drained out of the words. <i>“Even with the full array focused on the area, the scans are patchy – the atmospheric interference is wiping out little bits of sensor data all over. We’ve got another scan underway now, but I’m not holding my breath. We may not get a complete scan until there’s a lull in the storm.”</i></p><p>Spock turns to Chekov, who says without further prompting, “Extrapolating from the past seven hours of readings, the most optimistic projection is that the storm will abate in three hours’ time.”</p><p>“We don’t <i>have</i> three hours,” Leonard snaps. “The man’s been stabbed, for God’s sake. He needs medical attention <i>now</i>.”</p><p>“No one’s denying that, Doctor, but what exactly do you propose we do about it?” Sulu says. “The array’s not picking him up, we can’t beam him out without a transport lock – ”</p><p>Leonard shoots Sulu a disbelieving look. “Then it’s pretty damn obvious we ought to stop spinning our wheels up here and go down there and <i>get</i> him.”</p><p>“But sir,” pipes up one of Uhura’s aides, “the Xulosi Supreme Council made it clear that – ”</p><p>“You ever been gut-stabbed, Ensign?” Leonard says, rounding on the unfortunate Betelgeusian. “Or had to piece someone back together who has been? Because I have, and I can assure you, blood poisoning doesn’t give a <i>rat’s ass</i> about diplomatic relations.” The aide shrinks back in his seat, cowed, and Leonard turns his glare on the rest of the bridge crew, who’ve gone quiet as church mice watching the dust-up. “Now I know Kirk’s got some of you convinced he could just about walk on water if he put his mind to it, but I’m telling you we don’t have time to waste. We’re on red alert here.”</p><p>They all look to Spock, who’s standing stock still before the viewscreen, his back to the bridge. His spine is ramrod-straight, his shoulders perfectly squared with the kind of military precision Jim can rarely be bothered with. The only hint of movement is a very faint flexing of his left hand where it’s hanging at his side.</p><p><i>He</i> should be the one down there, Leonard thinks, with a nasty twinge of resentfulness he knows he’ll feel ashamed of later. Spock is his friend, probably the closest friend he’s ever had in his life after Jim, who almost doesn’t count at this point. Sure, there are days Leonard’s just one fraying thread of self-restraint away from chucking a tricorder at the man’s head, but as a general rule, there’s practically no one he’d <i>less</i> want in harm’s way.</p><p>It’s not fair of him, anyway. Jim had to have been the one to make the decision to switch out, to leave Spock in command while he went planetside with the away team, but Jim’s not here to be pissed at. He’s somewhere down on that stormy backwater, out of range of the sensor array and their comm signals and Leonard’s anger, his adrenaline-drugged body likely in a goddamn race with itself to see whether hemorrhage or septic shock can kill him faster.</p><p>It’s not Spock’s fault, but the fact is that he’s here and safe and Jim is neither, and there’s a selfish, desperate part of Leonard that hates him for it.</p><p>He’ll feel bad about it later. After he’s got Jim back.</p><p>Spock abruptly concludes whatever internal debate he’s been waging with himself, turns away from the viewscreen and announces to the silent bridge: “I will lead an extraction team. Mr. Sulu, Mr. Chekov, determine the appropriate positioning to ensure minimal interference with a matter stream from the Enterprise to the captain’s last recorded coordinates. Lieutenant Uhura, open a communication channel with the Supreme Council, and inform Mr. Scott that we will need as many signal boosters as he can provide, along with the most reliable prototype of his emergency transport device.”</p><p>“Aye, Commander,” they all chorus, and fall to their work instantly.</p><p>Not one crew member questions the orders, though there are plenty of reasons they might. The group that attacked the audience hall is still out there, quite possibly hiding out somewhere in the ravine themselves. There’s no telling how many more of them there might be skulking around down there, or even if they’re really rebels like the Xulosi are claiming – for all they know it could all be part of some coordinated plot by the Supreme Council to influence their negotiations with the Federation. The whole damn planet could be one big ambush just waiting to be triggered.</p><p>Then there’s the lightning. If the storm is what’s keeping them from reaching Jim, what’s to say they won’t be trapped down there themselves until it dissipates? Hell, what’s to say it won’t disrupt the confinement beam while they’re getting beamed down, so their particles get scrambled up and reassembled all wrong, or scattered like goddamn confetti across the planet’s surface?</p><p>All told, it’s a terrible plan – a reckless, stupid, dangerous plan, one with all the hallmarks of a typical James T. Kirk-style clusterfuck. Jim’s madness is contagious, Leonard’s been saying it for years, and now his crew are about to pay tribute to their absent captain by hurling themselves into a rescue mission as balls-out crazy as he is.</p><p>And still, not a soul pipes up with a word of dissent. They all know Jim would do no less for any one of them.</p><p>Jim should be proud. Leonard will have to remember to say so, later.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>Spock tries to order Leonard to stay on the ship.</p><p>
  <i>Tries.</i>
</p><p>Later, much later, Leonard will realize Spock was probably acting as a friend rather than XO, attempting in his stilted Vulcan way to protect Leonard from what he’d calculated they were most likely to find – but in the moment, oh, he’s fucking furious. He lights into Spock in front of the whole bridge, all his pent-up anxiety and frustration exploding out of him like super-heated plasma from a busted conduit: he is the <i>goddamn CMO</i> and the captain was last seen in critical condition, who knows what kind of shape he’ll be in when they find him or how quickly they’ll be able to get him to the medbay, Leonard’s the ranking medical officer on this ship and he’ll be <i>damned</i> if he leaves this responsibility in anyone else’s hands, this is Jim’s <i>life</i> they’re talking about –</p><p>He finally shuts up not because he’s run out of anger, but because Uhura lays a careful hand on his arm and says of course he’ll come, of course, her voice calm and grounding, her expression flickering with something Leonard doesn’t know how to interpret as she meets Spock’s eyes over the nav console.</p><p>Spock stares at her for a second, two, three – seconds Jim doesn’t <i>have</i>, God damn it – and says at last: “Lieutenant, inform Quartermaster Dinh that our party will require an additional expedition uniform fabricated to Dr. McCoy’s measurements.”</p><p>“Aye, sir.”</p><p>Spock turns away to consult with Sulu and Chekov, or maybe just to get the hell away from Leonard, and Leonard stands uselessly in place for a beat too long, stalled out, the worst of his fury defused by Uhura’s intervention but his chest still tight with restless frustration, a gnawing impatient urge telling him he should already be down there, there’s no time to spare, Jim <i>needs</i> him –</p><p>“Doctor.” It’s Uhura again, looking at him expectantly from where she’s leaned over the comms console. When did she get all the way back there? “Are there any additional supplies you need? I’ll alert medbay and have them brought to the transporter room.”</p><p>“No. Yes.” Leonard forces himself to think, to <i>focus</i>. Rough terrain, inclement weather, the possibility of field surgery if the ship loses their signals… “Autosuture. Cardiostimulator. Sterilizer. And ask Dinh for a tarp. Two tarps. And heating packs.”</p><p>Uhura nods and turns back to her console to pass on the orders, and Leonard manages to unstick his feet from the floor as the extraction team finally moves to depart.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>Christine meets them at the quartermaster’s office with the requested equipment in hand and her own critical care medkit hanging from her shoulder. “Figured you could use an extra set of hands,” she says, zipping up her expedition jacket with a little flourish of her newly healed fingers.</p><p>Leonard is so thankful for her sometimes, he doesn’t even have the words to express it.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>There are nine of them in total, crowding onto the transporter pad in their freshly fabricated expedition suits: Leonard and Christine, Spock and Uhura, and the five security officers accompanying the team in case of an encounter with the rebels or other unfriendly parties.</p><p>Scotty keys in the coordinates to beam them down to Jim’s last known location, deep in the belly of the narrow, winding ravine they wasted so much time staring at on the viewscreen. Leonard screws his eyes shut as the light coils around him, resigned but not especially looking forward to the possibility of being scrambled mid-beam by an atmospheric discharge and strewn halfway across the system like so much dust – but miraculously, when he opens his eyes again, all nine of them are still huddled together with what appear to be roughly the same number of limbs they started with, perfectly whole and blinking around at the darkness they’ve been plunged into.</p><p>Christ, it’s eerie as hell down here. The rain seems to have abated for the time being, but the ground is one big slick of rotten-looking black mud, and it’s twilight dark despite supposedly being midday local time. What little they can see of the sky is the same forbidding gray Leonard saw from above, still crackling with that celestial spiderweb of lightning that’s been screwing with the ship’s signals and sensors, and the rumble of distant thunder is constant, an ominous low-level hum from what feels like every direction at once.</p><p>“Spock to Kirk,” Spock is saying into his comm. “Do you copy, Captain?”</p><p>There’s no response.</p><p>“We shouldn’t be having as much trouble with interference down here,” Uhura murmurs, frowning down at the device in her hands. She swipes through a few screens, and her head tilts curiously. “We’re not. The signal is strong. Even without a booster, we should be reaching him.”</p><p>“So the problem’s on Jim’s end,” Leonard says.</p><p>“Most likely. His comm could be broken, or he could have lost it. Or…” Uhura shakes her head, her long tail of hair swishing behind her. Her lips have gone thin and tense. “It’s possible our transmissions are being received and the issue is with his outgoing signal. He may be hearing us, even though we’re not receiving his response for whatever reason.”</p><p>Leonard knows damn well that’s not what she was originally planning to say, but he’s grateful to her for the swerve. He’s barely keeping himself together as it is. He can’t dwell too long on the what-ifs or he’ll lose his goddamn mind.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>There’s no telling with any degree of certainty which direction Jim went from here, so after a few minutes of scouting, they decide to break into smaller parties to follow the three most likely routes. Spock and Lieutenant Korha’h will follow the ravine downstream, Uhura and Christine will head upstream with Ju and Hendorff, and Leonard will try his luck with Martinez and Chadha along a narrow switchback trail they’ve found cutting up the side of the gorge.</p><p>They test their comms, which appear to be networking properly across short distances, though only intermittently connecting to the ship herself. They’ll have to cross their fingers and hope the signal boosters are enough to overcome any interference from the storm, or they could <i>all</i> end up lost in different corners of this swampy hellhole.</p><p>Leonard’s stomach roils uneasily as everyone prepares to go their separate ways. Rationally, he accepts that this is the smart strategy: they’ll cover more ground and triple their chances of finding Jim in the same amount of time. Still, it’s not sitting right with him. Only one group is actually going to find Jim. Everyone else will be headed the wrong way, putting more and more distance between themselves and their critically injured captain. Leonard doesn’t like those odds, not considering what’s at stake.</p><p>He feels a smidge better when Spock presses the emergency transporter into his hand with a telling raise of his eyebrow.</p><p>“You will report out immediately if you discover evidence of the captain’s presence,” he says. “Lieutenant Uhura and I will do the same.”</p><p>Leonard nods his acknowledgment as he tucks the transporter into his pocket. At least now he stands a better chance at being able to reach Jim in time, no matter which group picks up his trail first – assuming of course that Scotty’s prototype doesn’t malfunction in some hideous way or another. They’ve been lucky so far, but it’s not too late in the day for someone to get spliced together inside-out or punted halfway across the galaxy. “Be careful out there. I don’t need any more patients.”</p><p>“You too, Doctor,” Christine says. She touches Leonard’s arm, lingers there for a minute like she’s got something more to say, but in the end she only offers him a gentle squeeze and a weak attempt at a smile before pulling her hand away.</p><p>A few steps away, Uhura is speaking quietly into her comm. “…you can hear me, but we have three teams fanning out to search the ravine. If there’s anything you can do to signal your location without attracting hostile attention, now’s the time. Otherwise, just stay where you are and keep an eye out. We’re on our way.” She lowers the comm, starts to flip it closed – and then hesitates, raises it again to add softly: “Hang in there, Jim.”</p><p>He’d damn well better.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>It’s slow going up the side of the ravine wall. The trail is steep and zigzagging, coated in a thick layer of slimy mud which slip-slides treacherously under their boots. It’s near impossible to find footing, and they’re forced to cling to the vegetation on either side of the path, dragging themselves up one handhold at a time.</p><p>Twenty minutes in, they’re all filthy and panting, seemingly no closer to the top than when they started, and Leonard is starting to wonder if it wouldn’t be wiser to head back down and try to catch up with one of the other groups. Martinez and Chadha are young and strong, among the very best Security has to offer, and even they’re struggling to heave themselves up this path. Hyped up on adrenaline or not, how could Jim possibly have managed it, gut-stabbed and weakened by blood loss? No, if he had an ounce of sense, he’d have stuck to level ground, found himself some little concealed spot to hide out and reserve his strength until he could be extracted.</p><p>Then again, Jim’s version of sense rarely lines up with everyone else’s.</p><p>“Sir!”</p><p>Leonard turns toward Martinez, who’s bear-hugging a craggy boulder on the opposite side of the trail. She points down, to where Leonard can just make out a black mark near the base of the rock – a muddy footprint, incomplete and skidding.</p><p>
  <i>Jim.</i>
</p><p>“Good eye, Lieutenant,” Leonard says, forcing the words out past the sudden tightness in his chest. He pulls out his comm to update Spock and Uhura with their finding and coordinates, and then they keep pressing forward up the trail, confident now that they’re on the right path.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>They find other signs along the way:</p><p>A torn-off segment of vine, which must have proven too weak to bear Jim’s weight, and a cracked sapling a couple meters down the slope which looks to have broken his subsequent fall.</p><p>Another footprint, this one on a fallen tree blocking the path, the pattern clear enough to be distinguishable as the tread from a starship uniform boot.</p><p>A Starfleet-issue hypospray with an empty green-striped vial in the chamber – Masiform D, one of the few stims Jim’s not allergic to, and consequently one of three color-coded medications he’s under orders to bring with him on all away missions.</p><p>And there’s blood, more and more of it the higher they get: a smeared handprint on a tree trunk, a ring around a branch, dark splatters along a stretch of leafy undergrowth, all of it half-dried to a tacky brownish-black like the mud beneath their feet.</p><p>There’s so much goddamn blood. Too much.</p><p>Leonard closes his eyes for just a second, one brief moment to let the reeling wave of vertigo pass over him, and when the moment’s over he forces himself to open them again, sucks in a shaky breath and grabs hold of the nearest tree branch to haul himself up another lung-burning step closer to Jim.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>They finally clear the top of the ravine nearly an hour after they set out, by which time Leonard is <i>exhausted</i>. He still can’t imagine how Jim managed the ascent, though his little breadcrumb trail of blood and footprints is evidence enough that he did. He’s hoping it means that Jim’s not too badly injured, that the blade found some relatively harmless angle into his abdominal cavity which left him bleeding like a stuck pig but without major organ damage. Hell, he’d settle for a nicked kidney or bladder, so long as the peritoneum is intact. He’s wrestled Jim out of the jaws of a whole host of unglamorous deaths, but there’s something especially gruesome about being poisoned by your own shit.</p><p>At this point, though, he cares less about the specifics of Jim’s injury and more about just <i>finding</i> him, and soon. No matter how bad the original wound was, he’s seen enough blood along the path to know they’re racing the clock.</p><p><i>Enough already, kid</i>, he thinks, scanning their surroundings for possible hidey-holes Jim could’ve tucked himself into. <i>Come on out now and let me get your fool ass home.</i> He’ll turn up the heat in medbay for him, just this once. He’ll pad the hard biobed with an extra blanket or two and give him a goddamn daily massage if Jim will just deliver himself up out of this cold dark hellscape to be cared for.</p><p>Fifty meters farther along the path, they emerge onto a plateau, the spindly gray-barked trees that have penned them in to this point suddenly falling away to reveal the wide, crackling sky. The additional light ought to make it easier to examine Jim’s tracks, but Leonard can’t make sense of what he’s seeing as he crouches down with the security officers to squint at the viscous mess of disturbed mud. Someone has passed this way, no question of that, but the imprints are big and sloppy, hard to read. Leonard can’t discern individual bootprints; it all just smears together in one long sliding trail – not like Jim’s feet were skidding, but like – almost like –</p><p>Realization sears through Leonard’s veins like a bolt of lightning, firing up every inch of his tired body with white-hot electric panic. He <i>runs</i>, slipping in the mud, overstuffed medkit banging hard against his hip as he follows the trail of Jim’s failing body.</p><p>“Jim!” he shouts. He doesn’t care who else might be out there, the hostile ears which could be listening for just such a cue, waiting to spring their trap on a fresh batch of victims. The only thing that matters is that Jim hears him, that he knows he’s coming. “<i>Jim!</i>”</p><p>The wind picks up the farther he gets from the shelter of the trees, stronger and colder at every step until it’s whipping past him in howling fury and it’s all he can do to keep his feet under him. He dimly recognizes that he’s running out onto some kind of cliff or overhang, narrowing to a point up ahead, <i>I’m here Jim, I’ll fix it, I’m here now kid but where are you</i>, and suddenly he’s at that point and he’s gone as far as he can go, right up to the very edge, and it’s not another ravine down below but a chasm – no, an <i>abyss</i>, a black yawning emptiness opening up at his feet with no bottom in sight and no sign of Jim.</p><p>He spins around, wild and off-balance, nearly losing his footing in the mud. Someone grabs his arm to steady him, but he barely registers it. “<i>Jim!</i>”</p><p>Chadha and Martinez are blurry red blobs in his vision as he scans frantically over the clifftop, searching for a hint of command gold, the shape of a hand or a leg, a flash of pale skin, a single strand of hair. He can recognize Jim at any distance, can unerringly pick him out in the densest crowd, all he needs is the tiniest fragment of the whole and he’ll know it’s him, he’ll <i>know</i> –</p><p>He’s not there. The clifftop is wide open, a flat narrow wedge of mud with nothing to block his view, nowhere to hide, and Jim’s not on it.</p><p>Leonard wheels back around and looks down, into the abyss. The overhang juts out so far that he can’t see the cliff face below it, just the unfathomable darkness of <i>nothing</i>, the same vast impenetrable black of a starless void. Not even Jim could find a path down from this edge. There’s nowhere to go from here, no way down except back the way they came, and Jim <i>isn’t</i> back that way. He’s never been a man to retreat, and it’s not the story his tracks tell. He got himself here, exactly here – climbing, crawling, clawing his way through the mud to this exposed, wind-battered point – and then – </p><p>And then – </p><p>“Sir,” says a voice that’s not Jim’s. There’s someone there beside him, dark eyes and thin furrowed brows and a too-small hand. The hand is pointing at something, he realizes, and it’s not Jim’s hand but he looks anyway, looks down and to the left and sees the Starfleet log recorder half buried in the mud at his feet, still blinking its little yellow <a href="https://youtu.be/6PRiEMXk-ik">light</a>.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thank you all for your wonderfully kind, insightful, encouraging words on here and on Tumblr. I really do have the very best readers in the world.</p>
<p>And, unfortunately, I'm about to repay your kindness with one hell of a chapter. Sorry, y'all. If you're going to hate me for any chapter in this whole story, it'll probably be this one.</p>
<p>Warnings for language, sexual content, graphic depiction of life-threatening injury, intense grief, depression, and referenced suicidal ideation.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Leonard has no idea what he’s drinking.</p>
<p>He swirls the liquor in his glass, watching the lazy whirlpool of liquid as it laps against the sides of the tumbler. He only just poured it, and already he’s forgotten what it is, which bottle he dug out from the locker under his desk. It could be the last of the bourbon from Yorktown, or maybe the whiskey they picked up on Piaj. It could be some paint-stripping shit from Scotty’s still or one of the competing bottles of brandy gifted by each of the delegations at the end of the peace talks on Andamar VI.</p>
<p>It doesn’t matter. He may not even drink it. It’s just something to do with his hands, a prop to distract him from the files open on the screen in front of him.</p>
<p>Out in the main bay, the lights have been dimmed for gamma shift. It’s quiet tonight, the beds all empty and neatly made-up, the nurse on duty probably playing some muted game on her personal PADD.</p>
<p>Leonard’s office is darker and quieter still. The only light is the bluish glow of his computer screen, the only sounds the faint slosh of the mystery liquor in his glass and the low hum of the ship.</p>
<p>He’s been living here, more or less, since – well. For a while. It’s convenient, if nothing else. There’s a cramped but serviceable sonic closet in the head and a basic replicator for the rare occasion he feels something resembling hunger, so he doesn’t often need to venture out into the rest of the ship. He can focus on working, double and sometimes triple shifts, as many as he can get away with, far more hours in a row than he’s pulled since residency, and when he inevitably gets kicked out he just retreats into his office to bide his time until he can sneak back onto the floor.</p>
<p>It’s best to take these enforced breaks during gamma, he’s learned, given that it’s usually a slow shift anyway. He’d be twiddling his thumbs out in the bay, and this way he can dive right back into work as soon as the first case of sniffles or neck pain turns up in the morning.</p>
<p>He tried sleeping in his actual quarters exactly once, early on, after a long day when Christine would just not leave off nagging at him about it. He knew better, knew himself too well to have a lick of faith in her insistence that he would feel better after a few hours of sleep in a real bed, but she pushed and pushed and <i>pushed</i> and he was too tired to keep fighting her. So he surrendered, went off to his assigned quarters on Deck 9 and changed into his assigned sleep clothes and lay down on his assigned bed and stared up at his assigned ceiling and thought without the slightest distraction about the unbearable wrongness of lying there all alone, how hard the mattress was beneath him and how cold he felt, how unmoored, as if the grav plating had stopped working and he was liable to drift right off into the void, and not two hours after leaving he slunk back into medbay in defeat, stalking past Nurse Jansen’s pitying gaze and into his office to collapse behind his desk and drink himself into something that might pass for rest.</p>
<p>He hasn’t been back since.</p>
<p>He’s never spent any real time there, is the problem. Not on this ship. All told, he probably hasn’t slept in the CMO's quarters more than half a dozen times since leaving Yorktown: the occasional night he didn’t get out of surgery until only an hour or two before the start of alpha, a few more that time he came down with a mild but highly infectious case of Lludrian flu.</p>
<p>His own quarters are too foreign to him, too silent and sterile. Too much room for his thoughts. His office is more comfortable, for all that he’s developed a chronic twinge in his back as a result of his tendency to fall asleep slumped down over his desk. (There’s a cot in the corner, brought in by Christine after she finally gave up on getting him to leave; Leonard appeases her by pretending he sleeps on it.) He knows this space, and he’s used to being in here by himself. It’s familiar without being <i>too</i> familiar. Neutral.</p>
<p>He’s been sitting here staring into his glass for long enough that his computer screen has dimmed, saving energy. He taps the corner to wake it back up and finds himself looking once more at Jim.</p>
<p>A memory of him, anyway. The picture in the personnel file is outdated, taken back around the start of the five-year mission. This Jim is a little too young, too blond, too sharp around the jawline – but his eyes are just right, blue as anything and startlingly bright, and there’s an unmistakable hint of trouble teasing at the edges of his solemn expression.</p>
<p>It <i>feels</i> like Jim, in a way that the rest of his file doesn’t, the sparse text defining his turbulent and extraordinary Starfleet career in the starkest possible terms.</p>
<p>Leonard sets the tumbler of liquor down on his desk with a clink of glass on glass, scrubs a hand over his face, takes as deep a breath as he can manage. He’s dawdled long enough. Putting this off isn’t going to make it any easier. It never does.</p>
<p>“Computer, play file,” he says.</p>
<p>It’s quiet, at the start. Quiet enough to hear the remnants of the recent downpour, the slow dripping splatter of raindrops against wet leaves. Quiet enough to hear Jim’s inhale as he brings the recorder to his mouth to speak.</p>
<p><i>“Stardate 2265.176.”</i> These first words are nice and clear – a bit formal, as Jim tended toward in his logs, and surprisingly energetic. Still running high on adrenaline, or maybe he’s already given himself the Masiform D. <i>“Following an attack by an armed rebel group on the planet Xulos in the Frillari system, I became separated from the rest of the away team, and have since lost contact with them and with the Enterprise.”</i></p>
<p>Jim pauses, the sound of his voice replaced for a few seconds by the slick sound of boots in mud.</p>
<p>
  <i>“I believe the others will have made it back to the ship by now, and I’m confident the crew is hard at work reestablishing contact. I’m currently attempting to reach higher ground so they’ll have an easier time locking onto my signal. It’s slower going than I’d hoped, as I sustained an injury – two injuries, technically, but who’s counting – I mean, okay. There’s one person who’s definitely counting.”</i>
</p>
<p>More sloppy mud sounds.</p>
<p>
  <i>“The point is, I was injured in the attack, and I think I’ve lost a fair amount of blood.”</i>
</p>
<p>A longer pause now, while Jim spends a good thirty seconds climbing over or around something. A boulder, or that fallen tree, maybe; it’s hard to say with any degree of certainty exactly where Jim is in this first portion of his log. Whatever it is, Jim seems to have a hard time maneuvering past it, his breath tightening as the unknown obstacle scrapes against the fabric of his uniform.</p>
<p>There’s a pained grunt as he finally clears the thing, a jolted bitten-back noise which suggests he’s done something his body doesn’t appreciate. <i>”Son of a </i>bitch<i>,”</i> he says, unceremoniously dropping any pretense of professionalism. And then, with a strained huff of breath that’s second cousin to laughter: <i>“Bones is gonna fucking kill me.”</i></p>
<p>The first time Leonard heard it, gathered with the rest of the senior crew in a tight anxious huddle around the ready room table, it almost brought a smile to his face. It’s so <i>Jim</i> – not the unflappable Captain Kirk, but his wry, smartass Jim. Leonard can perfectly imagine his expression in that moment. Lord knows he’s seen it enough times, usually accompanied by an orbital blow-out fracture or third-degree chemical burns or an elbow dislocated for the second time in a week.</p>
<p><i>Yeah, yeah, I know</i>, Jim will say as he delivers himself into Leonard’s hands to be put back together. <i>Don’t give me that look, Bones, I’m fine. All in a day’s work.</i></p>
<p>The Jim on the recording is far from fine, but as usual he’s still blithely forging ahead, confident that Leonard will be there at the end of his latest misadventure to make it all better. He always had such blind, relentless faith in Leonard’s ability to save him from anything and everything.</p>
<p><i>“Kirk to Enterprise,”</i> Jim is saying, quieter than before. Speaking into his comm instead of the recorder. <i>“Enterprise, do you copy?”</i></p>
<p>A long pause.</p>
<p><i>“Okay then. Looks like it’s onward and upward.”</i> The snap of the closing comm. <i>“At least it’s stopped raining.”</i></p>
<p>Click.</p>
<p><i>“In retrospect,”</i> Jim says, his breaths coming noticeably faster and louder than they were a second ago, <i>“the ravine was a bad call. Seemed like the right move at the time, but, hey. Live and learn. Just have to remember this for the next time I get stabbed in unfamiliar terrain.”</i></p>
<p>Click.</p>
<p><i>“The good news is, I’m pretty sure I’ve lost anyone following me.”</i> A pause. <i>“Or else they’re total fucking sadists who like watching their prey run themselves to death. One of the two.”</i></p>
<p>Click.</p>
<p><i>“I’m taking the longest shower of my life after this. I’m talking </i>hours<i>.”</i> </p>
<p>Click.</p>
<p>
  <i>“Bones must be freaking out. He’s gonna sic Chapel on me, I just know it.”</i>
</p>
<p>Click.</p>
<p>
  <i>“Note to self: ask Dinh about new tread pattern for mixed-terrain planets.”</i>
</p>
<p>Click.</p>
<p>The recording goes on like this for a while: clipped snippets of thought, wandering and informal, accompanied by muffled sounds of effort and the ever-present slick-sucking mud. It’s not like Jim to be so chatty on his logs, but he seems to be keeping himself company as much as anything.</p>
<p>Keeping himself alert, too, maybe. Already Leonard can hear him fading, exhaustion and blood loss dragging him down from the artificial energy peak of the stim. His words are coming a little slower, ragged around the edges, frayed by the strain of his increasingly quick and labored breathing. He’s starting to have trouble getting a full sentence out at a time.</p>
<p>
  <i>“Hope everyone made it…back okay. Randall’s ankle looked…pretty bad.”</i>
</p>
<p>Click.</p>
<p>
  <i>“Hands’re freezing. Can barely move my…fingers. Note for Dinh. Mixed-terrain…needs gloves.”</i>
</p>
<p>Click.</p>
<p>
  <i>“Really need to…start using the…climbing wall again.”</i>
</p>
<p>Click.</p>
<p>
  <i>“Just gotta…make it…to the top. Just…a little…farther…”</i>
</p>
<p>Click.</p>
<p><i>“Made it.”</i> Jim barely manages to choke the words out, but he sounds happy. Triumphant. <i>“Mother…</i>fucker<i>. That was… Fuck. Okay. Just gotta…where’d I…put my…”</i></p>
<p>Leonard hates this part.</p>
<p>
  <i>“Kirk to…Enterprise. Do you copy?”</i>
</p>
<p>His breathing is terrible to hear, gasping harsh and shallow with every hasty inhale, thin whines slipping out on the exhales. He gave the ascent everything he had. Too much.</p>
<p>
  <i>“Enterprise…do you copy?”</i>
</p>
<p>Leonard stares down into his drink, both hands circled white-knuckled around the tumbler.</p>
<p><i>“God.”</i> It comes out as a sob, raw and high. Gutted. Gutting.</p>
<p>Uhura turned away from the sound of it, the first time.</p>
<p>Spock closed his eyes.</p>
<p>Scotty hung his head.</p>
<p>Christine looked at Leonard.</p>
<p>And Leonard, like an idiot, said out loud: “<i>Jim.</i>” As if Jim could hear him. As if he might say back, <i>yeah, Bones?</i> through the ready room speaker, or crawl out from under the table, mud-blackened and shivering and beyond exhausted, desperate to find his way into Leonard’s hands so he could finally, finally rest.</p>
<p>There’s that same urge in him now – to respond to Jim’s pain, to reach out for him and hold him steady through this moment of utter despair. He wants to say Jim’s name, to comfort and console him. He would, if only Jim could hear him.</p>
<p><i>Jim,</i> he’d say, <i>you’ve done enough, kid. I know it hurts and you’re so tired. Just stay right where you are.</i></p>
<p><i>“Okay.”</i> More gasping, too-quick, pain-edged breaths. <i>“Okay. Okay.”</i></p>
<p><i>Stay and rest, Jim,</i> Leonard would tell him. <i>Don’t do this to yourself.</i> </p>
<p>Jim’s next words are louder, spoken directly into the mic. <i>“Comm’s not…working.”</i></p>
<p><i>Wait for me, Jim,</i> Leonard would beg him. <i>I’m coming for you, sweetheart. You have to know I’m coming for you.</i> </p>
<p>But it’s too late. Jim is back on Xulos, weeks and lightyears behind him, farther away with every passing minute, and there’s too much blood drying sticky-black along the trail up from the ravine. He’s cold, tachypneic, sliding hard and fast into the end stages, and Leonard can’t change any of what comes next.</p>
<p><i>“Gonna…keep going,”</i> Jim tells the recorder – breathless, hurting, and so fucking stubborn. Never able to sit still and wait for what comes next, not when there’s still something, anything he can do to move forward. <i>“Think I see…some light. Up ahead. Maybe…”</i></p>
<p>Click.</p>
<p>And then, at last: the sound of the wind.</p>
<p><i>“Vision’s…going.”</i> Jim’s voice is barely audible, words slurring into a drunken jumble. <i>“Think I’m…”</i></p>
<p>He trails off, too weak or disoriented to finish the thought, but the recording continues. The wind screams around him, even louder on the recording than Leonard remembers from real life: rushing shrilly over the mic, drowning out most other ambient noise. If Jim is still moving, it’s impossible to tell.</p>
<p>Leonard doesn’t think he is. He thinks Jim has made it to the cliff’s edge by now, discovered that there’s nowhere else for him to go. Cried out again, maybe, after realizing his comm still wasn’t reaching the Enterprise. Or maybe not. Maybe by this point he doesn’t have even that much left in him.</p>
<p><i>“’s bright,”</i> he mumbles, and Leonard imagines as he always does that he can almost see him there in the polished glass surface of the desk: his spent body splayed motionless in the black mud, his pale bloodless face turned up toward the crackling sky, the light of the spiderweb reflected in his unfocused eyes.</p>
<p>Leonard could still have saved him, if he’d gotten there at this point. But he didn’t. He was on the wrong side of the spiderweb, safe and useless on Jim’s ship with the rest of the crew, and Jim was – is – all alone, his futile hopes for rescue draining away along with the last of his strength.</p>
<p>There’s a long pause. Too long. Leonard’s breath caught the first time he listened – <i>is this it? is this the end?</i> – but it’s less than a minute before Jim is speaking again, low and hazy.</p>
<p><i>“Something's…wrong.”</i> The words are faint, underwritten with a creeping note of anxiety. <i>“Something's – ”</i></p>
<p>He coughs, makes a small wounded sound that digs its claws into the open wound in Leonard’s chest.</p>
<p><i>“No…”</i> he says, fainter still.</p>
<p>Scotty and Sulu still think that this part of the recording is the key to their unanswered questions. There must be some indication of what was going on, they insist. Maybe Jim spotted the approach of the rebels, or the onset of a localized squall. Maybe he thought he saw something up ahead, past the cliff’s edge. Something, <i>anything</i> that would explain what happened to him.</p>
<p>But as many times as they’ve played through the recording together, picked apart the file, isolated and enhanced and strained their ears for the slightest clue – the fact is there’s nothing to hear. Not even Uhura can make out a single sound beyond Jim’s thready voice and the ravenous howl of the wind.</p>
<p><i>“No,”</i> Jim moans again, louder this time, urgent and agitated. Leonard wouldn’t let his worst enemy get to this stage, if he had any say in it – will always choose to put a patient under to spare them the confused panic which seizes even the bravest souls as their bodies begin to shut down. <i>“Please …”</i></p>
<p>Another long, long pause – two whole minutes with no sound other than the wind buffeting over the mic.</p>
<p>Leonard drops his head into his hands, grips his hair so hard his scalp burns. Squeezes his eyes shut, as if that’ll somehow stop him hearing what comes next.</p>
<p>
  <i>“Bones?”</i>
</p>
<p>The first time he heard it, it felt like a knife in his chest, icy-sharp, savage shocking breathless trauma too sudden and devastating to be processed.</p>
<p>The hundredth time, it’s worse.</p>
<p>Some nights he’ll replay it over and over again – <i>“Bones?”</i> – <i>“Bones?”</i> – torturing himself by teasing out every hint of emotion he imagines he can read into that one word. He owes Jim this much, at least. He couldn’t save him, couldn’t even be there with him at the end, but at bare fucking minimum he can take this pain into his own heart: the cold horror of the man he loves slowly bleeding to death in the clinging black mud, confused and helpless and alone and afraid, asking him to make it better.</p>
<p>There’s a muffled sound, a sort of thudding squelch – the recorder falling from Jim’s hand into the mud, where it’ll stay for the next hour, still recording, until Leonard’s group arrives at the cliff (<i>”Jim!”</i>) and someone picks it up and turns it off. Leonard keeps listening, though he knows there’s nothing more to hear. There’s no trace of Jim in that hour, not a rustle or a groan or a death rattle or anything at all. At some point he’s gone, and at another point he’s <i>gone</i>, and Leonard doesn’t know when either of those points are but he listens anyway, because as long as there’s a chance Jim might still be there, he can’t leave him.</p>
<p>He sits in the darkness of his office and he listens, hearing nothing, and every so often he wonders if this is the moment Jim’s heart stops beating, the moment he stops listening to Jim dying and starts listening to Jim, dead. He wonders how badly Jim’s hurting at the end, if it’s better or worse than the radiation poisoning. He wonders if Jim’s eyes are open; if his mouth is open; if the blood has begun to sink through his body, pooling in livid stains where he’s pressed against the earth. If he’s even there at all, or if the shrill, furious wail of the wind has already swallowed him whole.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p><b><span class="big"><span class="big">KIRK, JAMES TIBERIUS</span></span></b><br/>
<b>STATUS:</b> PKIA<br/>
<b>SERIAL NUMBER:</b> SC937-0176CEC<br/>
<b>RANK:</b> CAPTAIN<br/>
<b>ASSIGNMENT:</b> N/A<br/>
<b>FORMER ASSIGNMENTS:</b> USS ENTERPRISE-A, COMMANDING OFFICER [ASSUMED 2263]<br/>
USS ENTERPRISE, COMMANDING OFFICER [COMMISSIONED 2258]<br/>
<b>SPECIES:</b> HUMAN<br/>
<b>PLANET OF ORIGIN:</b> EARTH<br/>
<b>BIRTH:</b> 2233.04, USS KELVIN SHUTTLECRAFT 37, RH’TROLA SYSTEM<br/>
<b>DEATH (PRESUMED):</b> 2265.176, XULOS, FRILLARI SYSTEM</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>“Doctor,” Spock greets him, looking up from his work as Leonard walks in. He indicates one of the empty chairs in front of his desk. “I am pleased that you requested this meeting. It has been several days since we have had the opportunity to speak.”</p>
<p>Leonard’s been avoiding him, is what he really means, but he’s found a gentler though still truthful way to phrase it. He’s come a long way over the years, Leonard reflects. He just might turn into a real boy after all, one of these days.</p>
<p>Spock watches him expectantly from across the desk. “Is this primarily a social appointment, or are there work-related matters you wish to discuss?”</p>
<p>“No,” Leonard says. “I mean, yeah, there’s, uh. Well. Here.” He can’t find the words that’ll make this easier – can’t find anything that’ll make anything easier, lately – so he just holds out the PADD he brought, gesturing for Spock to take it.</p>
<p>Spock studies the screen Leonard’s handed him for only a few seconds before looking back up at him with an unreadable expression. “You are resigning your post.”</p>
<p>“Yeah.” There’s probably something else Leonard should say now, some explanation or professional courtesy he should offer, but he can’t pull it together, doesn’t have the energy or the give-a-shit left in him. Spock’s got eyes; he can read the damn letter.</p>
<p>Spock turns his attention back to the PADD and reads the whole thing through, scanning the letter with the same intensity he might apply to an especially complicated set of calculations. “Doctor,” he says, and hesitates. He looks up and meets Leonard’s eyes. “Leonard.” His throat works in silence for a moment. Leonard doesn’t know that he’s ever seen him so visibly lost for words. “I recognize that this is a period of great emotional strain for you. You have been overextending yourself. You have not had the time or opportunity to – to process the events which transpired on Xulos. I would be glad to work with you to reevaluate your responsibilities in order to reduce your workload and allow you the time you require. Alternatively, if you feel that you are unable to remain in your post in any capacity at this time, I will grant you a leave of absence for as long as you request – or indefinite, if that is what you wish. There is no precedent for such an action, but I am certain that we could – ”</p>
<p>“Stop,” Leonard says wearily. “Spock, just…stop, okay? My mind’s made up. You can’t logic me out of this one.”</p>
<p>Spock stares at him, his eyes black and wide in a face that suddenly looks ashen. He’s hurting too, Leonard reminds himself. Just below the surface of that stoic Vulcan façade is a man who’s lost his captain and his friend, who still refuses to move into Jim’s old quarters, who went to the mat with both Starfleet Command and the Xulosi Supreme Council for the right to continue their search well past the point that logic dictated they should give up.</p>
<p>It’s for that man, not his commanding officer, that Leonard musters the energy to reach down inside himself and scrabble around for something approximating the truth. “Look, it’s not – this isn’t about you, or the work, or anything else. It was never gonna go any other way. It’s only been a question of ‘when.’”</p>
<p>“Leonard,” Spock tries again, but Leonard shakes his head, cutting him off.</p>
<p>“I can’t do it, Spock.” The words scrape like broken glass in his throat, gouging and tearing on their way out. “I just…I <i>can’t</i>.”</p>
<p>He can’t stay on this ship without Jim.</p>
<p>The seven years since he first came aboard the Enterprise have been among the best of his life, but they’ve been the hardest, too. He’s lost so many patients and friends. He’s watched helplessly as innocent people perished in senseless attacks completely outside of his control. He’s waded through more pain and suffering and sorrow than he would have seen in a hundred lifetimes back home in Georgia, so much more than he would’ve ever imagined he’d have the strength to endure, and the only reason he made it through to the other side is because he had Jim with him every step of the way. Jim made it all seem manageable, somehow. Space was disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence, but Jim was <i>Jim</i>: brilliant, indomitable, a guiding light to steer them through the black. No matter how bad things got, with Jim in charge, Leonard always knew they’d come through okay in the end.</p>
<p>And now Jim is gone.</p>
<p>It’s not that he doesn’t trust Spock. He’s a good captain, and he might be a great one someday, once he and Sulu have time to settle into their new dynamic. But he can’t possibly be everything Jim was to Leonard, no one could, and Leonard has known from the very beginning that he was in this with Jim or not at all.</p>
<p>Without Jim to follow, to believe in and look after – without his confidence to lean on, without the inexhaustible wellspring of his courage and resolve – without Jim to surprise him, to give him shit, to make him laugh, to <i>need</i> him –</p>
<p>Hell, without all that, Leonard doesn’t even know how to keep on living, much less how to stay out here alone in the vast lightless vacuum of space, pinballing from one tragedy to the next.</p>
<p>He couldn’t survive one more loss. Not one.</p>
<p>Spock sits across from him in silence for a long while, gazing blankly down at Leonard’s resignation letter. When he finally speaks, his voice is meticulously steady. “You will require a ship with warp capabilities which can be piloted by an individual. We are not currently in possession of such a craft, nor is it likely that you will be able to procure one on any of the planets in this system. I advise you to remain onboard the Enterprise until we arrive at Tvalekki, which is renowned as a commercial and civilian transit hub. Once there, Mr. Scott and I will assist you in finding a ship suited to your purpose.”</p>
<p>“Okay,” Leonard says, relieved that this is all Spock’s asking from him. “Sure.”</p>
<p>It’ll be another week, maybe two, before they reach Tvalekki, but what’s a couple more weeks in the grand scheme of things?</p>
<p>It’s not like Leonard’s got anywhere better to be.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>Leonard can still remember, clear as day, the moment he realized Jim was dead.</p>
<p>He thinks about it sometimes, in the dim humming quiet of gamma shift: walking up to the gurney, unzipping the body bag, peeling back one edge to reveal his best friend’s face. It looked so unlike him, distorted beyond the usual post-mortem waxiness, swollen and mottled with damage Leonard didn’t understand, but still he knew, the very instant he laid eyes on it: <i>This is Jim. Jim is dead.</i></p>
<p>He’ll never forget that moment – the cold shock that seeped through him, the enormous deafening force of it knocking him back, stealing the air from his lungs. Falling into a chair when his legs gave out on him, winded, numb, trembling with anticipation of the grief just starting to close in around him.</p>
<p>The pain didn’t hit right away. It would have, in time. If it weren’t for the trill of that Tribble, the hurt of Jim’s death would have ripped through him like a raging tempest, destroying everything in its path. He would have wept, or screamed, or fallen to the ground, rending his garments, gnashing his teeth. He would have stumbled back to Jim’s body, shaken it by the shoulders, begged it to wake up. He would have prayed to a God he no longer believed in to please give Jim back to him, he’d do anything, anything, <i>please</i> –</p>
<p>He would have mourned Jim for the rest of his life. He might never have recovered from losing him – and he would have known, known in his heart and in his gut and in the marrow of his bones, that Jim was gone.</p>
<p>Jim liked to chide him for being a cynic, would tease him that he could find the cloud to every silver lining, but even in his very darkest hours, at the blackest and most hopeless nadirs of his depression, Leonard would never have imagined that the universe could be crueler than it was in the moment he looked down into that body bag and knew that Jim was dead.</p>
<p>And yet, here he stands, living proof of his own failure of imagination. Condemned to a fate that puts all his old phobias and nightmares to shame: a loss without beginning or end, a moment’s pain stretched out into eternity, the infinite torment of uncertainty.</p>
<p>Looking back at the blurred-together days since Jim disappeared, Leonard can’t pinpoint when exactly he gave up hope. If he’s honest with himself, there’s a part of him that still hasn’t, that fantasizes about getting a message from Xulos one day, <i>we found him, it’s a miracle, we can’t believe it either but who are we to argue with what’s in front of us.</i></p>
<p>He’ll probably go on nursing that stupid fantasy for years, forever maybe, and he <i>hates</i> himself for it, because that tiny little kernel of hope is an insult to Jim’s suffering: his fear, and his pain, and his slow, cold, lonely death without a hand to hold or the slightest promise of salvation.</p>
<p>Jim had no hope, in the end. Why should Leonard get to keep his?</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p><i>”Doctor,”</i> Nurse Jansen says over the intercom, <i>“Lieutenant Uhura is here for you.”</i></p>
<p>Leonard doesn’t bother buzzing her into his office. He walks out to meet her in the main bay instead, snagging the bag from his desk on the way.</p>
<p>Uhura smiles when she sees him – a piss-poor excuse for a smile, though not the worst he’s had aimed his way recently. “Leonard. Hi. You ready?”</p>
<p><i>Obviously</i> he’s not fucking ready; that’s the whole reason she’s here. Leonard holds his tongue, swallowing back the ugly ingratitude that wants to spill out. “Yeah. Thanks for coming.”</p>
<p>“Of course.” The smile may not be genuine, but her readiness to help is. She didn’t even make him ask. He meant to, called her up and told her in a few short words what he needed to do, and when he faltered over the rest she smoothly cut in to advise him that she’d be off at 2000 hours if he’d like some company.</p>
<p>She’s a good friend. A good person. He said the vilest things to her, <i>meant</i> them with all his heart, and here she is just a few short weeks later, ready to let bygones be bygones.</p>
<p>She makes forgiveness look easy. Leonard wishes he knew her secret.</p>
<p>He fidgets with the bag in his hands as they step out into the corridor, belatedly trying to crush it down into something smaller, less conspicuous. Every eye is on him, it feels like, near-strangers’ gazes drawn to him like a circus oddity: searching, curious, pitying. Glad they’re not him.</p>
<p>“How’s Ellis?” Uhura asks.</p>
<p>It takes Leonard a second to figure out what she’s talking about: an accident down in Engineering, a minor injury made dramatic by the guilt of the shamefaced crewmen at fault. “He’s fine. We’ll keep him overnight for observation, but his blood flow is good and he responded well to neuroreg. Think his friends are hurting worse than he is at this point.” He gestures for Uhura to step onto the lift ahead of him. “You’d think they’d never seen a concussion before, the way they were carrying on.”</p>
<p>“On Scotty’s crew? Not likely.” Uhura keys in their destination on the lift pad as the doors whoosh shut in front of them. “Remember when the regulator exploded?”</p>
<p>Leonard snorts. “Wish I could forget. Christine’s never forgiven me for calling her back from shore leave to help sort that mess out.”</p>
<p>“Wasn’t that the same leave – ” She pulls up short, but it’s too late. They both know what she was going to say.</p>
<p>“Jim got into the Ipurnian roses. Yeah.” Leonard readjusts his grip on his crumpled bag, looks up at the numbers flashing on the display. “Hives on hives.”</p>
<p>The rest of the lift ride is quiet.</p>
<p>They’re the only ones around when they arrive on Deck 9. Leonard is glad for that. His chest feels tight, like he can’t get enough air. He wants to call the lift back, tell Uhura to forget it, sorry for wasting her time. He wants to retreat to his dark office and listen to the recording again. He wants to walk through the door they’re approaching and find Jim on the other side, smiling or stressed or swelled up with hives, or dying even, gut-stabbed and crying out for his help, but <i>here</i>, here in the light, within Leonard’s reach.</p>
<p>“You can say his name,” he says, because somehow this conversation is preferable to what’s coming next. “Everybody bends over backwards trying to avoid it. Talks in circles around it.” He shifts his weight to his other leg, restless in place. In this and every other place, these days. “I’m already…I mean, every fucking minute of the day. Every second. It’s not like I forget, and you’re gonna…” Back to the first leg. “It’s worse. The pretending.” The pressure in his chest cinches just a little tighter. “Like he never existed.”</p>
<p>“I understand.” She doesn’t, <i>can’t</i>, and for a long beat the air between them is heavy with uncomfortable awareness, but Uhura doesn’t fall over herself trying to explain or take it back, and for that Leonard is grateful.</p>
<p>“I don’t want to do this,” he says, staring at the door. While they’re sharing, or whatever. Might as well put it all out there.</p>
<p>“Would it help if I went in for you?" Uhura suggests tentatively. "You could give me a list. I’ll bring it all out to you, or down to medbay.”</p>
<p>Leonard wouldn’t have expected the ache that pulses through him at the thought, but it’s helpful in a strange kind of way. Nowadays it seems like his whole life is just a string of one shitty decision after another, choosing between different flavors of pain, and here’s one more.</p>
<p>Going in will be bad. Not going in would be worse.</p>
<p>Instead of answering, Leonard lifts his hand to the scanner, which hums thoughtfully before chirping, <i>“Bioscan confirmed. Good evening, Bones”</i> – because Jim just couldn’t abide a default program, always had to futz with any system or device that got within recoding distance and make his own mark on it, no matter how minor – as the door slides open to allow him entry to their quarters.</p>
<p>Jim’s quarters, technically. The captain’s quarters, even more technically, but Spock has refused to move in, even though they’re his now, by all rights. Maybe he’s still clinging to his own kernel of hope that Jim will need them again someday, or maybe he just gets the same nauseous, unbalanced feeling Leonard does as he walks inside and sees everything left exactly the way it was when they arrived at Xulos, a time capsule of the last day before the sky fell down.</p>
<p>The first thing that catches Leonard’s eye is the chess set, paused mid-game, gold- and silver-accented pieces scattered all across the boards. His throat constricts at the sight of it. He’d forgotten that they played, that last night. Or started playing, at least, until Jim decided he was more in the mood for another type of after-dinner activity.</p>
<p>“Do you want to bring it?” Uhura asks, looking from the chess set to Leonard.</p>
<p>“No.” It’s a beautiful piece of work, boards carved from the same gleaming marbled olive wood as the headboard in the bedroom, but it’s too bulky to fit in his bag, and he’d never use it anyway. “Spock can have it, if he wants. They played more than we did.” Maybe better to say that they played more seriously. You’d never see the two of them abandoning a match right in the middle of things like Leonard and Jim did that night.</p>
<p>Not that Leonard minded the change of plans. He was tired, he remembers – worn out after a demanding shift and not much interested in some long drawn-out strategic battle, especially not when the alternative was sliding into his lap, mouthing wetly at his throat and murmuring sly persuasion against his skin. A tedious, protracted back-and-forth that could drag on for hours versus a lazy round or two between the sheets <i>and</i> a full night’s sleep? It was no contest.</p>
<p>It’s strange, though: looking at the boards now, at the seemingly random arrangement of Jim’s gilded blonde pieces among his own dark silver-edged ones, he can suddenly see exactly what Jim’s strategy was. He’d thought at the time that they were evenly matched, but he realizes now that they were teetering right on the brink of a complex combination it hadn’t occurred to him to defend against – which was idiotic of him, considering that he once saw Spock use the same damn moves against Jim. Another handful of turns, and his king would have been wide open to Jim’s queen.</p>
<p>Unbelievable. There were few things Jim relished more than a dramatic win at chess, which means the cocky bastard must have been so confident in his victory that he figured it would still be waiting for him whenever he got around to coming back for it.</p>
<p>“He’ll like that,” Uhura says.</p>
<p>Leonard glances at her, still lost in the memory of Jim’s weight straddling his legs, Jim’s hot breath against his jaw, Jim’s loud yelping laugh when Leonard made to tumble him backwards so he could stand. Jim’s arms winding around his shoulders, latching tight, like he’d never let him go. “Sorry?”</p>
<p>Uhura nods toward the chess set. “Spock will be glad to keep it. Thank you.”</p>
<p>She might be lying. Leonard doesn’t care. She and Spock can dump the whole pretty bespoke mess down the recycling chute as replicator fuel if they want. It’s not like Jim will be needing it again.</p>
<p>“What <i>do</i> you want? Anything from out here?”</p>
<p>Leonard shakes his head. “It’s mostly…” He gestures toward the door at the far end of the room.</p>
<p>“Ah.” Uhura shifts her gaze off to the side, folds her hands in front of her as she pretends to study a wall panel. Trying to make it seem like she’s not waiting on his next move.</p>
<p>Leonard unfolds his bag and shakes it out, pulls the zipper open so it’s all in order. Ready to be filled. He just has to walk in there, throw a few things in the bag, and he’s done. Simple.</p>
<p>Not easy, but simple.</p>
<p>He follows the same path he and Jim stumbled that night across the lounge, around the couch, past the desk, up to the door that hisses open at his approach and on into the bedroom.</p>
<p>Uhura had been trailing a few discreet paces behind, but the sound of her footsteps pauses at the threshold, so Leonard turns back to check on her.</p>
<p>(Another shitty choice: watching her try to paste a neutral expression on her face versus looking at what she’s reacting to.)</p>
<p>“Blame Jim for that,” he says, tilting his head back toward the sight that’s taken Uhura aback. Maybe the elephant in the room will feel smaller if he calls it out. “You’ll be shocked to learn he was morally opposed to making the damn bed in the morning.”</p>
<p>Recovering gracefully, Uhura gives him a weak smile. “How out of character for him.” She steps more fully into the room. “You must have had quite a time rooming with him at the Academy.”</p>
<p>“That’s putting it politely.” Leonard crosses over to the dresser, eyeing the closet door with a flare of unease as he passes. Fuck. He’s got to figure out how to take care of that without Uhura seeing. “It wasn’t all bad. We got used to each other.” He slides open the middle drawer and starts pulling things out: jeans, shirts, the sweater Jim used to joke he gave him as a present to himself. “It was easier this time. Figured we got all our arguing out of the way the first go-round.”</p>
<p>The fact was, they never really stopped living in each other’s pockets, even during those years in the middle when they weren’t technically bunking together. Three long years of tripping over each other in that shoebox of a dorm room at the Academy had bred an overly familiar intimacy they never quite shook off, and even before Yorktown they already ate most of their meals together, spent most of their off-time together, wandered in and out of each other’s quarters as the mood took them without fussing over petty formalities like knocking.</p>
<p>So it wasn’t such a big change, shacking up for real. They were plenty aware of each other’s quirks and bad habits, and there wasn’t much they hadn’t already learned to tolerate, nothing so terrible they couldn’t find a compromise. Jim had always liked to sleep in a cooler room than Leonard did, but he made up for it by cuddling up in bed, so that Leonard came to prefer the chill too, since it meant he got a long-legged personal heater wrapped around him every night. Leonard insisted on sleeping in on beta shift days, but Jim got antsy staying in bed too long, so he’d go off to the gym for an hour or two and then crawl back into bed all flushed and sweaty to wake Leonard up in a way he couldn’t possibly complain about.</p>
<p>That was how it went between them: easy, undramatic. One or the other of them would give a little when they needed to, and they didn’t often need to. They just <i>worked</i>.</p>
<p>“Would you mind grabbing something from the head for me?” Leonard asks as he tucks the last of his off-duty clothes into the bag. “It’s stupid, but – Jim did something to his razor, I don’t even know what, but it’s the best damn razor I’ve ever used. Been using a new one the past few weeks and it’s just not the same.”</p>
<p>“Sure,” Uhura says. “Anything else you need from in there?”</p>
<p>“Just the razor, thanks,” Leonard tells her, and hustles over to the closet the second she’s out of sight.</p>
<p>The stench of spilled liquor hits him before the door is fully open, still potent in the confined space. “Shit,” he mutters, nausea rising through him as the smell brings memory rushing back. He should have cleaned all this up the same morning he woke up in here, eyes burning, throat raw, a half-empty whiskey bottle laying knocked over by his foot.</p>
<p>What he should have done, actually, was not come here at all, but he wasn’t exactly thinking clearly at the time. Spock had finally caved, abandoning Leonard as the only remaining hold-out for continuing the search, and they were leaving Xulos. Leaving Jim to rot down in the dark with only the company of strangers’ bones. Leonard doesn’t remember half the shit he shouted at Spock, and at all of them, the traitors, the heartless cold-blooded cowards who could barely even meet his gaze as they told him. He cursed them six ways from Sunday, called them every name in the book, swore and screamed until his voice gave out, and then he stormed up here to the quarters he hadn’t entered in weeks and drank himself into the kind of blackout he hadn’t ventured close to since before he joined Starfleet.</p>
<p>It was the only thing he could think to do. What he <i>wanted</i> to do was beam down to Xulos one last time and fling himself headfirst into that fucking abyss so that at least his body could stay near Jim’s, and that wasn’t an option – not because he was afraid to die, not because he could think of a single goddamn thing that made life still worth living, but because Jim would’ve been horrified that the thought even crossed his mind.</p>
<p>He couldn’t bring himself to hurt Jim that way, even if Jim wasn’t around to know or care, so instead he drank and drank and drank some more until he couldn’t even stand, much less find his way to the transporter room. He drank himself into the safety of paralysis, if not numbness, and the next thing he knew he was opening his eyes to the sound of the shift change chime, curled up on the closet floor around a heap of gold shirts.</p>
<p>He should have cleaned up then, but instead he crawled to the head and was good and sick, and when he was through he wiped his mouth and pushed himself up on unsteady legs and walked out the door without looking back.</p>
<p>Leonard picks up the bottle, finds the top rolled off into a corner and brings them both over to the recycling chute along with the pile of booze-stinking shirts. After a moment’s thought, he pulls his own medical blues off their hangers and shoves those into the chute too. At least his uniforms still have a chance at being turned into something useful.</p>
<p>“I found the razor,” Uhura says, waving it at him as she walks in.</p>
<p>“You can throw it in the bag.” Leonard pulls his jacket from the closet and closes the door before Uhura can come close enough to get a good whiff. Hopefully the smell will dissipate some with the worst of the mess gone. “That’s about everything. Just got to remember to grab my personal drive from the desk on the way out.”</p>
<p>“Want me to get it?” Uhura offers. She seems to like having a specific task to do. Leonard can’t say he blames her.</p>
<p>“Nah, I’ll just grab it on the way out.” He places his jacket in the bag and zips the whole thing up, leaving just enough room to slip the drive inside. There. Not easy, but simple, and now he’s done. All this time he’s been putting off what turned out to be a matter of minutes.</p>
<p>“Have you had dinner yet?” Uhura asks, far too casually for it to be anything less than premeditated and carefully calibrated. “I was going to head to the mess after this. Join me?”</p>
<p>She’s been comparing notes with Christine again. Leonard weighs this newest shitty choice: tagging along to the officers’ mess to get stared at for half an hour – or, God forbid, approached by some weepy ensign hellbent on offering his respects – versus enduring Uhura’s polite wheedling for however long it takes him to escape and then getting an earful from Christine later on.</p>
<p>Ah, what the hell. Uhura’s been a damn good friend to him today. He owes her one.</p>
<p>“I could use a coffee,” he says, just to set that expectation right here and now against whatever food-related machinations she and Christine may have in store.</p>
<p>This time, Uhura’s smile is true. “Great. Thank you.”</p>
<p>Leonard slings his bag strap over his shoulder. He’s all done, he tells himself. He did what he came here to do, and now he can get out and go drink the thought of it away in the dark chill of his office. As soon as he can reasonably take his leave from Uhura’s transparent attempt at caretaking, anyway.</p>
<p>He did exactly what he came here to do, but there’s one little problem. A big problem, actually, as it turns out the elephant in the room hasn’t really grown any smaller – at least, not to him. He can feel it looming behind him, its presence more obvious with every minute he’s been steadfastly trying to ignore it.</p>
<p>Different flavors of pain.</p>
<p>“Hey, uh…” he starts awkwardly. Uhura turns her gaze back to him, and he hesitates, not sure how to say this. Not sure if he wants it at all. “I think I…need a minute. If that’s okay.”</p>
<p>“Of course, Leonard.” Mercifully, Uhura doesn’t make a whole thing of it. “I’ll be out in the lounge. Whenever you’re ready.”</p>
<p>She disappears through the door, and Leonard turns, at last, toward the bed.</p>
<p>It’s a mess – pillows askew, sheets all bunched and wrinkled, blankets thrown back in a careless pile. Before Jim, Leonard would’ve never dreamed of leaving a bed in such a state. There were certain housekeeping practices he’d had drilled into him since he was knee-high to a grasshopper, and making the bed every morning was at the top of the list. Jim was the one who always argued there was no point in making a bed when you were just going to mess it up again later. Leonard thought that sounded like a pile of uncivilized horseshit, but hey, Jim was a grown man, and if he wanted to live in unkempt squalor it was no skin off Leonard’s ass – at least not until they got together and Jim’s messy bed became <i>his</i> messy bed, at which point the issue finally came to a head.</p>
<p>Leonard did try to do right by his mama’s raising, especially after they moved onto the ship and into these quarters which were truly <i>theirs</i> in a way the anonymous cookie-cutter officers' suites on Yorktown could never be. The bed was the hill he’d die on, he told Jim. Here they had this big fine bed they both loved so well – a bed fit for a king, a bed the crewmen in their narrow bunks would probably have brawled with each other like gladiators for the chance to spend a single luxurious night in, with its gloriously soft Cyclean wool blankets and the extra pillows Jim had sweet-talked out of Dinh, to say nothing of the magnificent headboard some poor woodworker on Yorktown had spent untold hours carving by hand, etching out the details of their design with painstaking care and craftsman’s pride. Didn’t a bed like that merit a little effort – a little <i>dignity</i>? Jim could use and abuse the rest of their nondescript Starfleet-issued furnishings if he liked, but the bed deserved better. It was an embarrassment to leave such a handsome bedstead looking like wild hogs had been rooting around on it. Just a crying shame.</p>
<p>Of course, such tedious concerns as tidiness or basic civility never held much water for Jim Kirk, a man for whom being raised by wolves might actually have been an improvement. In the face of Leonard’s pleas for propriety, Jim took up his own case with renewed vigor, all too willing to bolster his argument with frequent and enthusiastic demonstrations of just how quickly a neatly made bed could be wrecked, and by the end of his campaign Leonard had caved like a goddamn fallen soufflé. Jim was right, dammit: it didn’t make sense to waste time making up a bed no one else ever saw, not when they were just going to undo it all at the end of the day. They spent enough time changing the sheets as it was.</p>
<p>In any case, what Leonard failed to mention to Uhura is that this particular mess is all on him, considering he was the last one out of bed that morning. He and Jim normally got up at the same time when they were both working alpha, but Jim had set an early alarm that morning, slipping free of Leonard’s arms hours earlier than usual to oversee the away team’s departure.</p>
<p>That was the plan, anyway – and then, at some point between leaving Leonard here in bed and the 0600 beam-down, Jim’s plan changed.</p>
<p>He must have had a reason for it. There was a time Leonard would have chalked it up to cabin fever, a sudden whim, but the Jim who left their quarters that morning wasn’t the same man he’d been back at the Academy or in the early years of his captaincy. His tendency toward hotheaded impulsiveness had mellowed considerably over the years, and he’d learned the hard way how even his smallest decisions as captain could end up rippling out of his control. While he still trusted his gut above all else, he rarely did things just for the sake of doing them. He had his reasons for wanting to send Spock with the away team; he wouldn’t have changed his mind without an even better reason.</p>
<p>Whatever it was, though, he didn’t share it with Spock or anyone else, didn’t allude to it in his log. All Leonard knows is that Jim walked out of this room still planning to come back that night after an extra-long shift on the bridge, and half an hour later he beamed down to Xulos with his log recorder and three color-coded hypo vials in his pockets.</p>
<p>And Leonard didn’t kiss him goodbye.</p>
<p></p><div>
  <p>
  <i>He’s been drifting in and out of a doze since Jim got up, lulled by the hum of the ship and the quiet familiar sounds of morning ablutions and dressing, and he’s just barely awake when he feels the mattress dip beside him, the warm weight of hip and thigh sinking against his side. Fingers stroke through his hair, scratching at his scalp.</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“We’re coming up on Xulos,” Jim says softly. “I gotta get going.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“Mmph.” Leonard turns his face into the pillow. The lights are low, set to a feeble 10 percent so Jim can navigate the room without knocking into anything. It’s much too early to be awake yet. Even without Jim beside him, the pull of sleep is irresistible. “So get.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“Don’t forget, I’m borrowing Chapel to send with the away team.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“Mmm hmm.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>Jim presses a quick, dry kiss to his cheek, and then keeps going, peppering light little pecks all along Leonard’s cheekbone and down his jaw.  He lingers a while under Leonard’s chin, right at that fiendishly ticklish spot he usually knows to avoid, until finally Leonard huffs in annoyance and swats at him, squinting his eyes open to find Jim’s grinning face hovering close.</i></p>
</div><p>Leonard could have kissed him then. He could have lifted his head from the pillow and kissed the smile from Jim’s lips, sent him off with a slap on the ass and a smile of his own. He could have cupped Jim’s face in both hands and kissed his pretty mouth, his freshly shaved cheek, the thin fragile skin under each eye. He could have grabbed a fistful of Jim’s shirt and dragged him back down to the bed, stripped him out of his uniform and fucked him on top of the tangled sheets and kissed him the whole way through, breathing in every sweet sound Jim offered up to him. He could have kept him there so long that he would have been late getting to the bridge, and maybe he would have been distracted enough that he wouldn’t have thought to switch out with Spock, and he’d have been safe on the ship when the mission went to hell, snapping off orders from the command chair where he belonged instead of bleeding out all alone in the black mud on Xulos, a tinny frightened voice on a wind-drowned recording.</p>
<p>
  <i>Bones?</i>
</p>
<p>He could have done everything differently.  But he didn’t.</p>
<p></p><div>
  <p><i>“I’m </i>sleeping<i>,” he complains, only half joking, and shoves Jim’s face away with a clumsy hand.</i></p>
  <p>
  <i>Jim’s comm buzzes in his pocket, a dull vibration where his hip is flush against Leonard’s ribs.  “That’ll be Spock. He must be raring to go. Hope he’s waterproofed his boots.” He darts in for one last kiss on the cheek.  “See you later.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“See you,” Leonard says, already mostly asleep again.  He doesn’t watch Jim leave.</i></p>
</div><p>If he could do it all again, he thinks, looking at the sheets still rucked up around the memory of Jim’s body leaning over his – if he could rewind his own life as easily as rewinding an audio file, play it back and record over all the things he got wrong – he’d kiss Jim every chance he got. Every single goddamn chance.</p>
<p><i>If wishes were horses</i>, his granny used to say, <i>beggars would ride.</i></p>
<p>It doesn’t matter what he could have done, should have done, would give anything to have done. The past is the past. He didn’t kiss Jim goodbye, and Jim changed his mind about going to Xulos without telling anyone why, and now he’s dead and Leonard is alone and neither of them will ever sleep in this big handsome bed again.</p>
<p>Leonard tears his eyes away from the bed and takes one last look around the room where he passed some of the sweetest nights of his life. He should take something of Jim’s, maybe – his leather jacket, or the sleep pants that were a hair short on him because they started out as Leonard’s, or maybe the chess set after all – but there’s no point. He has Jim’s recorder, the very last thing he ever touched; that’s the only physical object that really means anything to him. Everything else is just stuff, stuff Jim left behind, and Leonard would trade all of it and more to have Jim himself back for a single minute. He’d trade anything at all: an arm, a leg, his vision, the use of his hands. He’d cut out his own heart if it would give him the chance to kiss Jim just one more time, to hold him close and tell him that everything would be all right, to make sure his last moments were filled with comfort and pretty lies instead of that raw, bewildered fear that was his only companion at the end.</p>
<p>Leonard strips the bed before he goes, wads the wrinkled navy sheets up in a bundle and deliberately does not bring them close to see whether any of Jim’s scent is still clinging to them. He stuffs the bundle into the recycling chute, along with all the rest of the clothes from the closet and dresser. These are Spock’s quarters now, whether he accepts that or not, and he and Uhura have been trying so hard to do right by Leonard – accepting his resignation, helping him get everything in order. This is the least Leonard can do for them in return.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>According to the final report Spock submitted to Command the day they left Xulos, Captain James Tiberius Kirk is presumed dead, his body believed to lay somewhere in the apparently fathomless depths of the abyss known by the locals as the <i>xyrta</i>. The report concludes that he fell: fumbled deliriously over the edge or rolled too far to one side in his agitated state, or simply got swept off by the wind, which the geo team clocked gusting at over 200 kilometers per hour during one particularly violent storm. Leonard wishes he could be certain that it was the latter, that Jim was already dead or at least unconscious when it happened – that he wasn’t awake for the long, long fall into the darkness.</p>
<p><i>The Xulosi maintain that the </i>xyrta<i> is infinitely deep,</i> reads the report. <i>Their belief is that it extends down far beyond the reach of the living and serves as a pathway to the afterlife. Generations of Xulosi have given their dead to the abyss, swaddling the bodies in shrouds and adorning them with trinkets before dropping them from cliffs similar to – and possibly including – the one from which it is believed Captain Kirk fell.</i></p>
<p>There was no point in searching, the Chief Councilor told them. The <i>xyrta</i> was a path which could only be traveled once, and it was a fool’s errand to seek the return of something long gone. She grieved for their loss, but they should take comfort in knowing that their captain had been delivered safely to the realms beyond. </p>
<p>They didn’t listen to her, of course. Not that it mattered. Whatever the <i>xyrta</i> was or was not, the Xulosi were right about one thing: it kept what it took.</p>
<p>They tried over and over again to send scouts down into the abyss. Countless crew members volunteered for the job, but none were able to rappel farther than a scant few dozen meters past the cliff’s edge without complaining of splitting headaches, joint pain, nausea, pronounced shortness of breath. No matter their biological makeup or the gear they were outfitted with, they inevitably begged to be brought up or simply went limp at the end of their tethers and had to be hauled back to solid ground. Leonard himself never made it past the forty-meter mark before blacking out, and God knows he tried enough times.</p>
<p>Their technological attempts didn’t fare much better. Their readings from the surface were all over the place, skewed to indecipherability by mystifying variations in pressure and gravitational force which defied Chekov’s best efforts to make sense of them. The probes they dropped lost contact after a couple thousand meters; their drone scanners shorted out and vanished forever. Specialized flashlights throwing over three kilometers encountered nothing but vertical rock and more darkness. None of their equipment ever registered a single trace of organic matter or came close to mapping the floor of the abyss.</p>
<p>Never before had the crew been so categorically thwarted in their attempts to survey a terrestrial planet. Everyone had their theories. The geologists claimed that their hodgepodge of readings only made sense if the planet had multiple cores. The biochemists argued that the <i>xyrta</i> must be brimming with unidentified toxic gasses rising from the mysterious depths, while a small but vocal contingent from Engineering hypothesized that the real problem was the abyss’s unaccountable conduction of electromagnetic forces. Hendorff and his team never stopped arguing that the <i>xyrta</i>’s riddles were all a red herring anyway since the captain had most likely been killed or captured by the rebels on his tail.</p>
<p>The Xulosi, of course, thought they were all morons for poking around in the sacred unknown and expecting to get anything out but disappointment.</p>
<p>Leonard doesn’t give a good goddamn about any of it. The only thing that matters is that he couldn’t reach Jim in time, couldn’t help him, couldn’t even bring his poor broken body home to rest in something like peace. What does he care about the reasons why? He’s not an engineer or a geophysicist or a fucking theologian. He’s just the doctor who fixed Jim’s every hurt but failed him when it counted, the worthless fraud who couldn’t live up to Jim’s boundless faith in him.</p>
<p>He’s just the man who loved Jim more than he could ever put to words, who shared his razor and his dresser drawers and his unmade bed, who whispered with him in the dark and held him close as he fell asleep all those nights ago, warm and mussed and satisfied, with his head resting heavy on Leonard’s shoulder and that smile of his like the cat that got the cream.</p>
<p>He’s just one more thing Jim left behind.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>“This ship was a sensible choice,” Spock says. “Mr. Scott says that this model is highly reliable and will require little maintenance.”</p>
<p>Leonard nods, following Spock’s gaze as he scrutinizes the ship in question, a sleek little black thing, shiny as a rhinoceros beetle. “Yep.” He already knows all this, but if running through it again makes Spock feel any better, he’ll let him talk.</p>
<p>“The operating system represents the latest in AI technology, which makes it ideal for single-pilot travel,” Spock continues. “And the food replicator is said to be top-of-the-line.”</p>
<p>“Uh huh.” Leonard will be the judge of that. He’s always been skeptical of replicated food, something Jim delighted in busting his balls about, and he doubts that this ship’s machine is much of an improvement over the Enterprise’s. Not that it matters, really. He hasn’t eaten a thing recently that’s tasted like anything other than ash and sawdust.</p>
<p>All in all, though, he has to hand it to Scotty and Spock – the ship they found for him does seem to be a pretty fine little feat of engineering. The dealer called it <i>user-friendly</i>; Leonard thinks <i>idiot-proofed</i> is probably a more accurate description, but he’s glad for it either way. The less room for human error, the better.</p>
<p>Spock launches into an assessment of the AI-assisted navigation system, and Leonard listens with half an ear, waiting for him to talk himself out so they can say their farewells and Leonard can be on his way. He’s already said goodbye to everyone else: Christine and the rest of his staff, Uhura and Scotty and Sulu and Chekov, the Jeffersons and their infant son.</p>
<p>His stomach turns over at the thought of that big-eyed, wriggly-fingered baby boy: sweet little three-week-old James Reginald Jefferson. He should have asked Kiara to change the name. He almost did, when she told him. He came this close to explaining to her that the last thing Jim would have wanted was another innocent child saddled with a dead hero’s legacy, one that could so easily crush or strangle him, condemn him to a life of never quite measuring up. Jim would have <i>begged</i> her not to do it, if he could’ve.</p>
<p>But he couldn’t, and Leonard didn’t. Kiara was so earnest, her face shining with that uniquely postpartum mix of exhaustion and overpowering emotion, and Leonard couldn’t bring himself to look her in the eye and tell her she was wrong to honor the captain she’d adored.</p>
<p>One more thing Jim would never have the chance to forgive him for.</p>
<p>He would just as soon have parted ways with Spock in his office or something, but Spock insisted on accompanying him to the shuttlebay – simply to see him off, Leonard hopes, and not in some eleventh-hour attempt to change his mind.</p>
<p>Right on cue, Spock finally finishes listing off all the specifications of the ship and its many features, apparently satisfied that he’s not sending Leonard off in some beat-up old junker, and turns to him with an expectant expression. “Where do you plan to go?”</p>
<p>“Home, I guess,” Leonard says, though he knows even as he’s saying it that it’s a lie. Back to Earth, sure, most likely – but home? There’s no such place. Not for him; not anymore. “I’ll have to make some stops along the way, obviously. Haven’t really thought it through yet.”</p>
<p>“It will be a very long journey,” Spock says, carefully neutral. “Are you quite certain you wish to attempt such an endeavor alone?”</p>
<p>Leonard shrugs. He can’t fault Spock for being concerned. The very idea of jetting off into deep space all by his lonesome should scare the piss out of him. Two months ago, it would have. But things are different now. The black doesn’t seem so black anymore, not after he’s stood at the edge of the <i>xyrta</i> and stared down into the fathomless void that had swallowed up the brightest light in the universe.</p>
<p>Intellectually, he knows Spock is right. He <i>should</i> feel scared, anxious, completely overwhelmed by the journey ahead of him, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t feel much of anything, truth be told. The pain of losing Jim is like a singularity inside him, everything and nothing at the same time, consuming all traces of any other sentiment. It might collapse in on itself eventually, let him get back to normal, but maybe it never will and all those damn pesky emotions he’s always had so much trouble with are gone for good. Maybe Jim took them with him, turned out the lights when he left, or maybe Leonard’s just lived too hard these past ten years, used up all the feelings he was ever going to have, and now the rest of his life will just be more of this dull sameness, lukewarm and flat and <a href="https://youtu.be/lOeqL9P8rNk">colorless</a>.</p>
<p>“Ah, I’ll be fine,” he tells Spock. “Like you said, the AI’ll do most of the work. I’m just along for the ride.” He hitches his bag up onto his shoulder, swallows down a swell of nausea at the sense memory</p>
<p>(the pressure of the strap digging into him, the dull pain of the kit banging against his hip, the wind howling in his ears)</p>
<p>and reaches out to pat Spock’s shoulder. “Take care of yourself, all right? Don’t go giving Christine too much trouble.”</p>
<p>It’s a little unorthodox, naming a nurse as CMO, but then it was unorthodox staffing the Fleet’s flagship with untested cadets in the first place. The Enterprise has been Captain James T. Kirk’s ship since her maiden voyage, and that’s always meant not worrying too much about hewing to the established norms. Jim would probably get a kick out of knowing his crew was continuing to flip the bird to convention even after he’s gone.</p>
<p>Besides, when it came down to it, Christine was the obvious choice. She’s the best nurse Leonard’s ever worked with, with a skillset and breadth of knowledge far beyond her formal training. Leonard would choose her to operate on him over half the board-certified surgeons he knows. He couldn’t be leaving the Enterprise’s crew in more capable hands.</p>
<p>“I will endeavor to abide by your wishes,” Spock says, a slight tilt to his mouth. “You may rest assured that, like her predecessor, Lieutenant Chapel will not hesitate to make her displeasure known if I fail.”</p>
<p>Leonard tries to return the smile. He can’t quite manage it, not yet, but he does try. “So long, Spock. I’ll, uh…I’ll be in touch.”</p>
<p>They both know that’s not true, but in one last act of friendship, Spock doesn’t call him out. He holds up his hand, fingers splayed in a Vulcan salute. “Live long,” he says, with as much feeling as Leonard’s ever heard any Vulcan put into the words, “and prosper.”</p>
<p><i>Christ</i>, Leonard thinks as he turns to board the ship that will take him out into the black, <i>I fucking hope not.</i></p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Remember all those soft fluffy fics I've written for pverse? Maybe go seek solace in those. I know I will.</p>
<p>♥♥♥</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Chapter 3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>So! How are we doing after that last chapter? Good? Great? Emotionally stable and optimistic?</p>
<p>Sorry, sorry. Enough teasing. Last week's chapter was a bruiser, and I'm grateful to you for hanging on and warily giving this next chapter a chance even after all that. I can't say for sure that you'll like me any better after Chapter 3, but it definitely has a different balance to it. So let's get to it, shall we?</p>
<p>Warnings for language, sexual content, grief, and depression.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Piaj isn’t much like Leonard remembers it.</p>
<p>It’s the low season for tourism in this region, chilly and gray. The charming town center has lost its summertime luster, the narrow streets no longer bustling with visitors, the cheerful burbling fountains gone dry, all those picturesque balconies looking naked and spartan without their lush raiment of flowering vines. Leonard crosses paths with a couple locals while he’s making his way toward the lodging assignment office, but even they seem duller than he remembers, bundled up against the cold with their antennae neatly swaddled and their chins tucked low as they hurry past.</p>
<p>At least the lodging office is open, though the lone agent on duty looks mighty surprised when Leonard walks in. Understandably so – she can’t have a lot of folks strolling through the door these days, and Leonard’s probably not much of a sight for sore eyes after being cooped up alone on his ship for so long. But a client is a client, and though the terms are unusual, she’s willing enough to make a deal with him, accepting his granddaddy’s ring as a token bit of collateral in exchange for an ornate key nearly as long as Leonard’s hand.</p>
<p>“There may be some dust,” she warns him as she hands it over. “No one has been inside since we finished the deep clean at the end of the season.”</p>
<p>As if Leonard cares. “I’ll be back in a couple hours,” he says, pocketing the key.</p>
<p>“Take your time,” the agent says. “If you choose to extend your stay, we will be happy to accommodate you for as long as you wish.”</p>
<p>Leonard nods, grabs the door handle, and – dammit. His conscience stirs with an unpleasant twinge of guilt. His mama would kill him for being so short with anyone, much less this kindly lady who's trying to help him out. And Jim –</p>
<p>He turns back to the agent and forces himself to say: “Thank you, ma’am.” It comes out pretty rough, as most of his side of their sparse conversation has. Creaky, like an old door hinge. He hasn’t had much cause to speak recently, outside of the occasional command to the ship’s AI, and his throat feels dry, closed up with disuse.</p>
<p>The agent smiles, sunny and impersonal. “It is my pleasure, sir.”</p>
<p>It’s clear that she doesn’t remember him at all. Leonard remembers her, though, if only because Jim liked her. Jim liked just about everybody, of course, but he took a particular shine to this agent, especially after he’d chatted her up enough to learn that she had a sister on Andamar VI, where he’d moderated reconciliation talks just a couple months before. Once they started in on that they were off to the races, jabbering on about the political situation on Andamar, the famed brandy, the subtle but crucially important distinctions in regional dialect that could so easily trip up hapless outsiders like themselves. It was a good twenty minutes before Leonard finally managed to get Jim out the door, the key to their beach cottage clutched in his right hand, his left pressed firmly to the small of Jim’s back to keep him moving.</p>
<p></p><div>
  <p><i>“Five days, Jim,” he says, steering him away from the lodging office with a touch more force than is probably necessary. “Less than a week we have here, and you want to spend it gabbing with some stranger about </i>work<i>. Unbelievable.”</i></p>
  <p>
  <i>“Oh, loosen up,” Jim says easily. “She was nice.” He reaches around and peels Leonard’s hand off his back, tugging it forward to swing between them instead. “We’re on leave in paradise, Bones. How are you still wound so tight?”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>Leonard tries to maintain his show of exasperation, but it slips out of his grasp, melted away by the warm golden sunshine and the simple pleasure of Jim’s hand in his. It’s too much effort to keep up the charade, so he lets it go, arching a brow and slanting Jim a considering look, like he’s really mulling the question over. “Well, you’re still wearing pants, for one thing.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>Jim grins. “I can take them off right here, if you want,” he offers, magnanimous.</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>Leonard rolls his eyes, though his heart’s not in it and he knows Jim can tell. “Groceries first, you degenerate.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>Jim leans over and smacks an obnoxiously loud kiss to Leonard’s cheek. “And whiskey.” </i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>Leonard squeezes Jim’s hand. “And whiskey,” he agrees.</i>
</p>
</div><p>It’s for Jim’s sake that Leonard tries his best to dredge up an answering smile for the lodging agent. It settles unnaturally on his face, tight and awkward, out of practice, but if she notices, she doesn’t say anything. He almost thanks her again, just for that.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>The cottage is a long way outside of town. It’s the most distant and isolated of all the oceanfront lodgings, a full kilometer past the nearest neighbors. That was Jim’s doing. He wanted privacy, and as soon as he said as much, Leonard wanted it too.</p>
<p>The seaside is deserted, the long row of brightly painted cottages all sitting empty, locked up tight against the threat of blustery winter storms. To see it now, you’d never guess this was one of the most popular destinations on a resort planet that draws crowds from systems around.</p>
<p>The last time Leonard was here, this stretch of beach was lively with activity: families picnicking out on the sand, children of all species running around in boisterous impromptu gangs, barefoot honeymooners strolling hand in hand down by the water’s edge as their footprints washed away behind them. Then of course there was the inevitable sprinkling of grouchy old folks, sent on doctors’ orders to take in the air, which in practice left them sitting motionless on their porches like living gargoyles, glaring stone-faced at the squawking gaggles of kids racing by.</p>
<p></p><div>
  <p>
  <i>“Hey, look, Bones, it’s you,” Jim says in his ear, nodding too conspicuously toward a man scowling at them from the house they’re passing. He laughs and stumbles when Leonard shoves him, falls away a couple graceless steps and then, like a pendulum, comes back to Leonard’s side, closer than before.</i>
</p>
</div><p>But that was during the summer, at the peak of the high season. It’s well into winter now, overcast and bitterly cold, the famous turquoise sea gone dull and choppy, and the families and lovers and porch gargoyles have long since packed up and gone home.</p>
<p>Leonard shoves his hands in his jacket pockets and keeps walking, making his way toward the tiny white speck off in the distance.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>The cottage is closed up like all the others, windows and doors shut tight. Piles of windblown sand carpet the steps and lie heaped in miniature dunes along the base of the porch, so pale and smooth that it could all be mistaken for fresh snowfall. The hanging plants Leonard liked so much are gone, and the chairs and side tables are missing too, packed away somewhere to wait out the winter. Only the swing remains, stripped of its cushions and wavering on its chains from the force of the drafts coming off the water.</p>
<p>Leonard makes his way up the sand-frosted steps and pulls the key from his pocket to open the front door. The lock is old-fashioned, a touch fiddly, and he has to negotiate with it for a minute</p>
<p></p><div>
  <p><i>“Best surgeon in the Fleet and you can’t open a </i>door<i>, Bones?”</i></p>
</div><p>before it finally yields and lets him turn the handle.</p>
<p>There’s a stuffy smell to the entryway – not dirty, but stale, sealed-in. Leonard leaves the door open behind him and lets the cold breeze chase him inside, stirring up the dust.</p>
<p>The floorboards creak underfoot as he makes his way into the bedroom. The bed is neatly made, its oversized pillows fluffed and propped just-so against the headboard. Foolishly, the sight of it takes him aback. What was he expecting? Of course the cleaning staff made the damn bed. It’s just not how he’s been remembering it all this time: no kicked-away covers hanging off the side of the mattress in a twisted knot, no dent in either pillow where a head once lay. The crumpled topography of the sheets has been pulled taut, leaving nowhere for errant grains of sand to hide, nowhere for scrabbling fingers to grip and cling to.</p>
<p>It's a nice bed, anyway. Plain, but luxurious in its own way. The bedding is white as can be, crisp yet soft, and the wooden headboard is polished and unfussy, with simple rails in place of the elaborate design from their own bed. Nice and sturdy. Easy to hang onto.</p>
<p>Leonard runs his fingertips along the smoothed-out coverlet and thinks of Jim’s hands sliding slow and purposeful along his thighs; Jim’s hair slipping through his fingers; Jim’s face turned up toward him, the early morning light shading those eyes the same deep shimmering turquoise as the tranquil sea.</p>
<p>The rest of the room is as neat as the bed, everything in its place: the nightstands uncluttered with PADDs and water glasses, the mirror cleaned of smudges, the hamper tucked into a corner with its lid closed. It looks strange to him now, but the room must have been arranged just this way when they arrived. He can’t recall. His memory of those first minutes is too crowded with Jim, bright and quick and chattering as he dropped his bag in the middle of the floor for Leonard to trip over and darted around opening windows and investigating drawers before finally falling back onto the bed with a long happy sigh that drew Leonard in like siren song. </p>
<p></p><div>
  <p>
  <i>“Shoes.” Leonard kicks Jim’s ankle with his own bare foot until Jim groans and flails his legs, sending his sandals flying off to parts unknown and no doubt showering a nice gritty layer of sand across the floor.</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“Fussy, fussy,” Jim says, the tease pulling long and taut as he flings his arms up over his head in a leisurely stretch. “You realize this is a beach house, right? This place is gonna look like the Sahara in a couple days.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>Jim’s shirt has ridden up some, and Leonard doesn’t hesitate to take advantage, splaying his hand on the pale stripe of belly so generously offered to him. “Damn, you got me there. No point in trying to maintain some semblance of civility. We should just give up and wallow in our own filth like animals all week long.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>Jim brings his arms back down and lays both hands over top of Leonard’s. “You’re such a drama queen.” He rolls his head to the side, bringing them face to face, so close Leonard practically goes cross-eyed looking at him. “Hi.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>Leonard smiles. “Hi.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>Jim tilts his chin up to kiss the tip of Leonard’s nose. Ridiculous man. “We should get changed. Check out the water before dinner.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“Sure.” He doesn’t move, though, and Jim doesn’t either – content, for once, to lie still a while longer, his hands resting comfortably over Leonard’s, his side-slanted mouth not quite near enough to kiss.</i>
</p>
</div><p>Leonard does a circuit around the room, drifting aimlessly from bed to window to dresser. It’s so <i>quiet</i> without Jim here to fill the silence with his cheerful chaos. There's no breezy stream-of-consciousness patter, no sun-bright peals of laughter, no tuneless humming from the bathroom or banging and clanging from the kitchen. There’s not even a distant sound of shrieking kids or squawking gulls floating in from outside to keep Leonard company, just his own footsteps and the low rumbling hum of the sea.</p>
<p>He slides the top dresser drawer open, like Jim did when they first arrived, to find nothing but bare wood and a sweet-smelling lavender sachet. It’s the same sight that would have greeted Jim all those months ago, but still Leonard is struck by a strange pang of disappointment, as if some part of him really expected to see the drawer stuffed full with swim shorts and linen shirts.</p>
<p>As he shuts the drawer, though, he notices a rattling noise, loud in the wide empty quiet. He pulls the drawer all the way out this time to see what it might be and discovers a small rock hiding in the back corner - a homely gray thing, pitted and uneven.</p>
<p>Leonard picks it up, curious, and realizes as he does so that it’s not a rock after all. It’s a seashell, or rather a piece of one, one edge so straight and sharp that it must indicate a break. The outside is rough to the touch, but the inner curve is smooth and gleaming, opalescent in the dim light.</p>
<p>Jim would have liked it. It’s just the sort of thing he’d have plucked out of the sand on one of his afternoon treasure hunts, rinsed off in the sea and brought to Leonard for safekeeping. He had a whole pile of them by the time they left, shells and bits of sea glass and coins from far-flung worlds. This could even be one of his, a straggler which fell off the dresser and found its way into some hidden corner, only to be discovered months later during the end-of-season cleaning and tucked away in the drawer by a busy maid.</p>
<p>It’s a nice thought. A bit too fanciful to be true, but nice.</p>
<p>Leonard pockets the shell and closes the drawer again. The bathroom door is standing open to his left, and he pokes his head in to find the place spotless, the fixtures shiny and the sloping white tub and scalloped sink basin scrubbed free of soap scum. The floor tiles are so pristine he’s reluctant to even step foot inside, so instead he turns and walks back through the bedroom, crossing the hall to get to the kitchen.</p>
<p>Here, too, everything is scrupulously clean. He and Jim always left it such an ungodly mess that it’s almost hard to recognize as the same place he brewed coffee every morning, stirring cream and sugar into their cups while keeping a prudent eye on Jim, who could <i>not</i> be dissuaded from cooking breakfast bare-assed naked.</p>
<p></p><div>
  <p>
  <i>“I just want you to think good and hard on the wisdom of frying bacon that close to your dick,” he says, hooking his chin over Jim’s shoulder so he can watch the sizzling pan in front of him. He wraps his arms tighter around Jim’s waist, prepared to yank him back the second that grease starts spitting too enthusiastically.</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“What can I say,” Jim replies, with about as much regard as he usually demonstrates for Leonard’s sound medical advice. “I like living dangerously.”</i>
</p>
  <p><i>Leonard snorts, kisses his shoulder. “You like living </i>stupidly<i>.”</i></p>
  <p>
  <i>“Tomayto, tomahto,” Jim says, and hums in approval as Leonard’s hand slides down to cup protectively around the body part in question. “Bacon’s gonna burn again.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“So turn the heat off this time, dumbass,” Leonard tells him, muffled where his mouth is otherwise occupied at Jim’s neck, and Jim’s hand shoots out to twist the stove dial just as Leonard hauls him backward into their next round.</i>
</p>
</div><p>There’s nothing much to see here, all the crumbs and grease splatters long since scrubbed away, and Leonard moves on through the doorway to the living room. It’s brighter than any of the other rooms, illuminated by the weak gray glow of midwinter daylight coming in through the floor-to-ceiling windows, and here, at least, things are pretty much as he remembers – unfortunately, in the case of that ugly-ass loveseat with its eye-searing multicolored upholstery. The damn thing still makes him feel motion-sick just looking at it, but he’ll grant that it’s plenty comfortable, enough so that he and Jim got in the habit of having breakfast there every morning. Jim liked the view from the windows, and Leonard liked having Jim crowded up against him, fucked-out and languid, one long leg slung lazily over Leonard’s thigh as he sipped his coffee and gazed out at the sea.</p>
<p>Eventually, though, Jim would have his fill of looking and decide it was time for a more active appreciation of Piaj’s charms. He’d haul Leonard up from the loveseat and tow him across to the bedroom to change into their suits, abandoning their dishes to be dealt with at some later hour when the waves weren’t beckoning quite so invitingly.</p>
<p>Leonard follows the cold draft back into the foyer and out the open door to the porch. The view’s not the same as he remembers, but it still stretches out for what seems like forever in both directions, an uninterrupted panorama of sea and sky.</p>
<p>Jim couldn’t get enough of that. He couldn’t get enough of any beach, really – sandy or rocky, temperate or tropical, there was something about the meeting of land and sea that just drew him in. Back in their Academy days, he must have dragged Leonard to every stretch of shoreline within a hundred kilometers of the city. Tide pools, dog runs, hiking trails, leathery old sunbathers who’d opted for their birthday suits in place of bathing suits – Leonard never knew quite what he was going to get from any given trip, but he learned early on that he’d better bring along a tricorder and a thermal blanket, because there was no force on earth that could keep Jim from running out into the water no matter how cold it was or how many signs were posted warning about riptides.</p>
<p>No such precautions were necessary here on Piaj, of course. God, but Jim loved it here. And Leonard did, too. He’d have loved anyplace that made Jim so happy.</p>
<p>He’s tired, suddenly, the cold and the long walk catching up with him all at once. He lowers himself onto the swing, which sways backward with a familiar creak in response to the added weight. That hasn’t changed any, either. It’s a good solid swing, sturdy and well-balanced. He spent many a lazy afternoon sitting right here, nursing a couple of fingers of whiskey on the rocks and making slow progress through a novel while Jim played around down by the water’s edge.</p>
<p>Leonard has never been much of a beachgoer himself. He doesn’t especially care for the ocean either in concept or in practice, and back in Georgia he always vacationed in the mountains, much preferring long quiet hikes in the woods and peaceful evenings by a fire to the heat and salt of the Atlantic. Piaj has its forested and alpine resorts too – that’s their whole thing, after all, having an option for everyone – but Leonard didn’t bother suggesting they spend their leave there, not when he knew Jim’s heart would be set on the seaside.</p>
<p>And what did he care, in the end? What the hell did the scenery matter when he slept nine blissful hours a night in a comfortable bed and woke most mornings to the devilish-sweet trail of Jim’s mouth making its way down his belly? What could he possibly find to grumble about as he sat drinking his morning coffee with a hand curled over Jim’s bare thigh, watching the tide come in and listening to Jim ramble on about amphidromic systems and lunar altitude? No, Jim had it right: Piaj was paradise. Leonard spent that whole leave just about as well-rested, well-fed, and well-fucked as a man could be, glutted on burnt bacon and Jim’s undivided attention, and never for an instant did it occur to him to want something different.</p>
<p>Still, he was never going to match Jim’s enthusiasm for tumbling between sea and sand all day. So they compromised: every day after breakfast they’d put on their bathing suits and head down to the water together for a few hours of playtime, and come afternoon they’d each do their own thing, Leonard setting up camp on the porch swing while Jim roamed the beach and ducked in and out of the surf as the mood took him. Leonard didn’t mind getting left behind while Jim had his fun. He was perfectly content to amuse himself with good whiskey and a middling book for a while, and it wasn’t exactly a hardship to watch Jim running around in his tiny blue shorts, lighthearted and fleet-footed, his hair glinting golder by the day.</p>
<p>Besides, Jim never strayed too far. He’d trot back to the house every so often to drop some small oddity into Leonard’s hand, shake his dripping hair out all over Leonard’s PADD, maybe steal a kiss or a sip of Leonard’s drink before taking off again, kicking up a flurry of fine silver sand in his wake.</p>
<p>Eventually he’d wear himself out and come back to collapse next to Leonard on the swing, press up against him all wet and sand-smeared. Leonard didn’t mind that, either. They were on leave – what did it matter? There was no one around to see the mess Jim made of him, the damp sand clinging to his leg, the patch of wetness bleeding down his shirt from where Jim liked to rest his head and peer at the screen in Leonard’s hand.</p>
<p><i>Next page</i>, he’d say occasionally, and Leonard would roll his eyes, flick Jim’s leg, swipe to the next page when he was good and ready.</p>
<p>It was a moot point, in any case, as Jim never once managed to stay upright long enough to finish a chapter. He’d stroke idly along Leonard’s forearm for a while, muffle a yawn or two against his shoulder, and then inevitably he’d begin sliding down, down, until he was slumped across Leonard’s lap, where they’d both known from the start he was always going to wind up.</p>
<p>Leonard would set his PADD aside then, and just...let himself be. Let his body relax under the weight of Jim’s, let his thoughts and hands drift where they pleased. Let his fingers trace over the caramel-colored freckles popping up on Jim’s skin – sprinkled liberally over his nose and cheeks, scattered in whirling constellations across his shoulders – following the capricious pattern of them with his fingertips while Jim hummed at the touch like an overgrown cat.</p>
<p></p><div>
  <p>
  <i>It occurs to him with uncommon clarity, the thought appearing in his mind like a revelation, so self-evident that it’s beyond even his ability to doubt: Jim draped in a heavy sun-warmed sprawl across his lap, Jim’s hand trailing up and down his calf, the faint rhythmic squeak of the swing nearly drowned out by the lapping waves, a barely touched single malt sweating a dark sloppy ring on the table beside him, and all of it adding up to the realization that this moment, this precise instant in time, is the happiest he’s ever been.</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>And then Jim rubs his cheek against Leonard’s thigh, turns his head to offer up a small drowsy smile, and damned if he isn’t just that little bit happier.</i>
</p>
</div><p>He sits now in that same spot, looking out at the rough winter sea, and thinks on how it’s a strange thing to know your best days are all behind you. Oh, he thought he knew that once before, back in those hopeless drink-hazy months before he joined Starfleet, when he still believed a failed marriage and the crushing guilt of his daddy’s death were the worst pain his heart knew how to feel. Back when he’d just gotten done fucking up every good thing he’d ever had and couldn’t see how there could possibly be any kind of future for him, so he figured he may as well speed things along by getting himself shipped out to whatever miserable demise space had in store.</p>
<p>But that was before he met Jim. Before he learned that with Jim around, there was always a future to look forward to – always some bright-wild newness looming over the horizon, just out of <a href="https://youtu.be/VpTkuDXLPPg">sight</a>.</p>
<p>Leonard should have hated that. He’d always thought what he wanted was constancy: a stable home, firm ground beneath his feet, no sudden shocks to trip him up and send him spinning off-course. Jim gave him the opposite, and added insult to injury by tricking him into loving it. Every day was some new disaster with that kid around, and yet somehow Leonard had never felt so at peace with himself, content to let Jim drag him deeper and deeper still into the chaotic unknown, lighting it up as they went to reveal all the tiny treasures hiding out there in the dark.</p>
<p>Space was a goddamn nightmare, but with Jim, it was also wonder and discovery and <i>potential</i>. It was the glittering Crystal Forest on Dvetti, the unreal beauty of the auroras above Nopol. It was lives saved and disasters averted, grateful families and a fragile, tentative peace on Andamar VI. It was that look on Jim’s face that always made the hair stand up on the back of Leonard’s neck, the slow dawning of some cockeyed idea that would probably save all their asses in the end if it didn’t manage to kill them first. It was after-shift drinks in the Deck 12 observation lounge, arguing with Spock over the risk of autoinflammatory response with the new Mylean pox vaccine while Jim gossiped away in Russian with Chekov and Uhura. It was Jim’s salty mouth on his and another brilliant bit of sea glass pressed into his hand, countless others still waiting to be unearthed from the powdery white sand.</p>
<p>Life with Jim felt limitless, unbounded. There was always something new still to come, something better, something <i>more</i>. With Jim, even more of the same could get better somehow – more comfortable, a snugger fit, like a favorite shirt. Worn in, but not worn out, not nearly.</p>
<p>And now…now it’s after Jim.</p>
<p>There’s nothing better to be found over the horizon, no promise of fresh happiness to draw Leonard outward and onward into the black. There’s only now – the dull, flat, colorless present – and the faded memories of kinder days gone by.</p>
<p>He drifts slowly up out of his musings, more aware than usual of the immensity of the grief sitting heavy in his chest, a leaden mass crushing up against the inside of his ribcage. Like everything soft inside him has calcified, turned to stone.</p>
<p>He doesn’t cry – hasn’t cried in a long while. The hurt is too big for tears, too solid. It just <i>is</i>.</p>
<p>The tide’s going out, he notices. It’s getting late; the sun will be going down soon. He’d best start heading back to town, to his ship. He doesn’t know what he was hoping for, coming back here, but all he’s found is an empty house and endless reminders of everything he’s lost. There’s no point in sticking around.</p>
<p>He pushes up to his feet, wincing at the twinge in his back. The swing’s a good deal less comfortable without the cushion, it turns out, and the cold has seeped right through him, leaving him feeling stiff and heavy all over, his hand numb and prickly from being propped on the armrest. He shakes it out and is starting to pat at his pockets, searching for the key, when his eye catches on a tiny splash of color on the top step, vivid against the pale sand.</p>
<p>He goes for it instinctively, stoops down and reaches out to brush the sand away, and before he can think too much about it he’s plucked out a fragment of seashell, cracked along one edge.</p>
<p>For a minute, all he can do is just look at it, a lost little broken thing in the palm of his hand. Rough and gray on one side, smooth and gleaming on the other.</p>
<p>He digs around in his jacket pocket and brings out the shell piece he found in the dresser. He cups the two pieces together, tilts his hand to watch the dull light catch on their iridescent inner curves – and then, with cold-numbed fingers, he lines up their sharp edges and watches them vanish, the pieces fitting so perfectly together that he can hardly make out the break.</p>
<p>The hurt in his chest grows a little bigger, a little heavier. He breathes around it, unsteady, doing his best to accept what he cannot change.</p>
<p>Yeah. Jim would’ve liked that, all right.</p>
<p>Leonard tucks the seashell halves into his pocket as he stands, turning to lock the front door. He needs to get going. It’ll be a long walk back into town.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>♥</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Chapter 4</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I know. I KNOW. Your hearts are weary. You want so badly for the pain to be over. And it's not yet, I'm afraid. But stay with me just a little longer. Be brave. You can do this.</p>
<p>Warnings for language, sexual content, grief, and depression.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The admiral is in her office when Leonard arrives, standing at one end of the oversized curve of her desk and examining a projection of what looks like some kind of inventory.</p>
<p>Leonard has never been in here before. He’s surprised by how open and dramatic the space is, the latticed glass walls sloping outward as they rise, the mirrored prism formed by the far corner of the room glittering with the lights of the station outside. It bears only a passing resemblance to the mental image he’d constructed from Jim’s offhand comments about his many meetings here, and he’s impressed by how well the real deal suits Admiral Paris, an uncommonly stately and imposing figure in her own right.</p>
<p>Even now, he instinctively straightens his shoulders as she catches sight of him, struck by the sudden irrational urge to smooth down a uniform jacket he’s not wearing. He no longer answers up the Starfleet chain of command – and frankly, he never gave half a tinker’s damn for rank and hierarchy when he did – but there’s something about the admiral that commands respect.</p>
<p>“Dr. McCoy,” she says, swiping the projection down before striding over to greet him. It might be the first time she’s ever called him by name and not rank. She extends a hand, and he clasps it briefly. “Welcome back to Yorktown. Thank you for coming to see me.”</p>
<p>“Of course,” Leonard says, a touch awkwardly. It’s not like he had much of a choice in the matter. He may not serve in Starfleet anymore, but he still knows when the dockmaster informs you on arrival that the starbase commander wants to meet with you, it’s less an invitation than a summons.</p>
<p>“I was sorry to hear of your resignation,” Paris says, getting straight to the point, as usual. She never was one for small talk. “You were an invaluable asset to your crew and to the Federation. If you ever decide to return to your post, rest assured that Starfleet will welcome you back without hesitation.”</p>
<p>“Thank you, ma’am. But – ”</p>
<p>“But you won’t,” Paris says. “I know, Doctor. We won’t be getting you onto another ship.” She observes him for a moment, her expression warmer than he’s used to seeing from flag officers and yet somehow even harder to read. “Yorktown Medical could use a leader with your skills and vision. Commander Culber speaks very highly of you. I imagine that he is prepared to offer you a senior civilian position of your choosing.”</p>
<p>“Maybe so, ma’am.” Leonard would put credits on it, actually. Hugh is almost certainly going to try to convince him to stay on here – and if it were any other kind of place, he might be tempted. It would be easy enough to slot back in with his former team at the hospital; to while away some of his downtime hours visiting with Hugh and Paul, Ben and Demora; to see his friends on the Enterprise whenever they stop by for leave or a resupply. He was happy here once, Hugh will argue – why not stay and try again?</p>
<p>Paris tilts her head slightly, as though trying to see Leonard from another angle. “You will not accept.” It’s not a question, not an order. Just a plain statement of fact.</p>
<p>“No, ma’am. I’m afraid I won’t.”</p>
<p>Paris doesn’t look displeased – or surprised. “A loss for our station,” she says mildly. “But these things can’t be forced.” Her dark eyes are still fixed on him, a keen and steady gaze which makes him wonder what all she’s seeing, the things she’s <i>not</i> saying. He’s starting to understand what Jim meant about her quiet brand of velvet glove diplomacy. “Nevertheless, with all your expertise, I do hope you’ll eventually consider returning to medicine in some form, whether as a clinician or a researcher. Commander Culber tells me he will be leading a multi-institutional study concerning the use of auditory stimulation to map neural pathway damage after trauma. You were a collaborator on one of his earlier studies in that vein, were you not?”</p>
<p>“I was, ma’am.” It’s how they met, back when Hugh was still at SFM and Leonard was moonlighting in the trauma center between Academy lectures. Lifetimes ago, it feels like. “I’ll ask him about it.”</p>
<p>It’s clear Paris doesn’t believe him – rightly so – but she doesn’t press the point. Instead, she finally breaks her gaze and turns away, moving toward the slanted glass wall. Outside, the snow globe has gone dark, their artificial world shrouded in artificial night. It must be past 1930 hours already.</p>
<p>In all honesty, Leonard’s still not overly fond of this place. It’s why he’ll be turning down Hugh’s offer, regardless of how he might try to sweeten the pot or convince him it’s the right move. Sure, it’d be nice to work under Hugh again. He <i>likes</i> Hugh, respects him tremendously. Likes and respects Paris, too, for that matter. Not that he knows her all that well, but Jim admired her, thought her head and shoulders above most of the admiralty; that’s enough of a character reference for him.</p>
<p>So the problem’s not with the people – it’s with the base itself. The fact is, Leonard could no more imagine staying here alone than he could staying on the Enterprise. Less so, even. At least the Enterprise is <i>going</i> somewhere. No one pretends a starship is anything but what it is, a slick bloodless machine designed to safely ferry its passengers from one location to the next.</p>
<p>Yorktown is different. Yorktown has delusions of grandeur, of <i>substance</i>, and it’s that attempt to have it both ways that’s always gotten under Leonard’s skin. People aren’t meant to live like this, sealed into a great big hamster ball rolling around in the void, but the folks in charge have worked so hard to dress the place up, to disguise the unnatural artifice of it all: fine-tuning the lighting system to mimic real sunlight, programming an agreeable range of variation into the climate controls for each zone, filling the glassy lake in the Central Plaza with schools of brightly colored fish to distract from the dizzying house of mirrors-style reflection on the surface of the water. There’s even an entire zone dedicated to parks and nature exhibitions, as if that’s not the most ridiculous oxymoron you could imagine. But everyone here seems happy to buy into the pretense. Leonard had to shake his head on his way in when he noticed the new flowers out front of HQ, carefully curated blue and purple effusions of larkspur and hyacinth and Zandrian begonias plucked from their rightful homes around the galaxy and coaxed into a strange coexistence in hard-edged marble planters. A pretty touch of window dressing, but you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Yorktown just isn't an organic place, no matter the airs it puts on.</p>
<p>The flower displays and parks and pre-scheduled sunsets might be convincing enough if you’re not inclined to think on them too hard, but the real giveaway is the constant low-level noise of the station maintaining itself. The long-term residents probably don’t even notice. It’s like the old saying about living near a waterfall: after a certain point, you just stop hearing it. But Leonard’s arrived at the base with fresh ears, and he’s uncomfortably aware of the steady mechanical hum of artificial gravity and atmosphere and life support and environmental control systems – and as he and Paris both know all too well, if any of those paused for even a minute, this whole glossy charade would fall right apart. It’s only thanks to Jim that none of the ten million souls living here have ever had to learn that the hard way.</p>
<p>It’s only thanks to Jim that Leonard has any affection for the place at all. He <i>was</i> happy here once – because he had Jim waiting for him at the end of every artificial day, Jim’s cheerful chatter drowning out the noise, Jim dragging him out to take advantage of some of those top-tier bars and restaurants and nightclubs, Jim babbling on about the station’s pioneering grav sim formulas and mold-breaking architectural specifications until Leonard was too busy being confused to have any headspace left for unease. Just as with every other ghoulish existential nightmare they encountered over the years, Yorktown was all right as long as he had Jim, who could make anything seem a little less frightening, a little more magical.</p>
<p>He would have stayed here forever, if that was what Jim had wanted. But not now. Not without Jim.</p>
<p>It <i>is</i> a damned impressive feat of engineering; Leonard will grant it that much. And it’s a convenient stopover for a few days, an opportunity to stretch his legs and force himself to remember the basic rules of sentient interaction. Just because he can’t see himself living here in the long term doesn’t mean he can’t appreciate what it has to offer.</p>
<p>“I understand, you know,” Paris says, her hands folded neatly behind her back as she stands gazing out at her base. She might be looking at the towers looming up all around them, or at the aircars slipping skillfully between, a scattering of blurred lights in the darkness. “As I told Kirk once, it isn’t uncommon to want to leave. Without direction, without something or someone to ground you...it’s easy to get lost.”</p>
<p>She turns toward Leonard again, and there is something different now in those keen eyes – something gentle, softened. Compassionate.</p>
<p>Son of a bitch. She <i>knows</i>.</p>
<p>He and Jim didn’t keep their getting together a secret, exactly, but they didn’t go around formally alerting all the higher-ups either. Jim had a complicated relationship with the brass, to put it politely, and while he’d managed to stay in their good graces for a couple years by that point, he also didn’t see any reason to hand them a charged weapon to use against him the next time he inevitably ended up on their shit list.</p>
<p>Jim was kind of hesitant the first time it came up, like he was worried Leonard would kick up a fuss over it, but Leonard agreed with him. No sense borrowing trouble – God knew they found enough as it was. Frankly, he barely gave the matter a first thought, much less a second. He had Jim in his bed every night, beautiful and playful and clingy and most often naked as a jaybird, and as far as he could tell they were both pretty happy with that. What the hell did he care what anyone else knew or thought about it?</p>
<p>So they played it safe, stayed under the radar, at least until they got off Yorktown. Of course the crew worked it out eventually, no doubt whispered and gossiped about it like a bunch of middle schoolers, but they were all too fanatically loyal to Jim to go tattling on him. A minute ago, Leonard would’ve sworn that particular scuttlebutt never made it off the Enterprise.</p>
<p>But Paris knows. She doesn’t say it aloud, doesn’t need to. She just looks at Leonard with that steady, unwavering gaze, and he looks back at her, and neither of them say a thing. What is there to be said? He loved Jim, Jim loved him back, and now Jim is dead. That’s it; that’s all she wrote.</p>
<p>(Inside his chest, the hurt is vast and heavy, hard as stone. <i>Ossified</i>, he thinks, distantly. Seems fitting. It’s all he’s got left.)</p>
<p>“I have something to give you, Doctor,” Paris says at last. She turns away again, this time to walk back to her desk, where she picks up a box Leonard didn’t notice before – small, with a label on the side he can’t make out in the low light. She brings the box over and holds it out to him in offering. “Captain Kirk’s effects,” she says, responding to his obvious confusion. “He left a few things behind in his quarters. I had hoped to return them to him at the Enterprise’s next resupply.”</p>
<p>Leonard accepts the box with both hands, stricken by the sudden irrational fear that he’ll drop it. It’s fairly light, nothing rattling or shifting as he takes it from Paris. There can’t be much of anything inside. Whatever it is, though, it’s Jim’s – the most Leonard has had of him since the last time he walked out of their rooms on the Enterprise. He clears his throat. “Thank you, ma’am.”</p>
<p>Paris smiles for the first time, a small sad thing. “There’s a suite for you in the officers’ tower. You’re welcome to stay as long as you’d like.”</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>She’s put him in Jim’s fucking quarters.</p>
<p>The suites in the officers’ tower all look the same, well appointed in a streamlined, sterile, anonymous way. They have the same layout, the same furniture, the same handful of dishes in the kitchenette cupboard. Once you’re inside, they’re impossible to tell apart.</p>
<p>But this isn’t just a matter of resemblance. This is Jim’s actual goddamn suite – 1248, second from the end on the righthand side of the floor. Never mind that it’s identical to all the others, including Leonard’s previous assignment a few doors down. It’s <i>Jim’s</i>.</p>
<p>Leonard doesn’t know whether it was intentional or not. There are only so many suites, and most of them are probably occupied, given that he spotted both the Salcombe and the Stargazer at the dock. It’s possible Paris just told a subordinate to reserve something for him and they picked this suite at random. It wouldn’t be the strangest coincidence he’s encountered out here.</p>
<p>If it <i>was</i> intentional, Paris probably thought she was doing him a kindness: reminding him of better days, giving him back whatever small traces of Jim she could.</p>
<p>Standing here in front of the couch where Jim kissed him for the first time, a box of Jim’s forgotten belongings cradled against his chest, Leonard’s not sure whether he wants to throw up or send the admiral a handwritten thank you note.</p>
<p>He’ll deal with the box first, he decides. After that he can figure out how he feels about the suite.</p>
<p>He sits down on the couch and opens up the box to find a tidy jumble of stuff inside. More than he expected.</p>
<p>Right on top is a small tube, half squeezed out. Leonard is picking it up to examine the label when it dawns on him that it must be the salve he had Jim using on the little patches of dermatitis he broke out with not long into their stay here, a stopgap measure while they tried to identify what was causing the reaction. It took three days – and as many shifts at Yorktown Medical – before Leonard finally worked out the culprit.</p>
<p></p><div>
  <p><i>“I’m allergic to your </i>hands<i>?” Jim demands, sounding horrified. “What the fuck. Can’t you give me a shot for it or something?”</i></p>
  <p>
  <i>Leonard arches an eyebrow at Jim’s reflection, hovering anxiously next to his own in the wide backlit mirror. “Mark this one down in the record books. Today’s the day Jim Kirk volunteered for a hypo.” Jim frowns at him, and Leonard chuckles, checks Jim gently with his hip as he reaches for a towel to dry his hands. “Relax, kid. Your finicky-ass immune system apparently doesn’t care for the soap they use in the scrub rooms here. I’ll just have to start washing up real well soon as I get home, is all. Pass me that tricorder, would you?”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>Jim obeys, still looking about as downhearted and fretful as a youngin who’s been told Christmas is cancelled. He watches eagle-eyed as Leonard passes the tricorder scanner over first one hand, then the other.</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“See? All clear,” Leonard says, nodding toward the tricorder screen, which is showing not a trace of the antimicrobial compound Jim’s skin finds so offensive. “Told you I’d figure out what the problem was. I always do, don’t I?”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“You do,” Jim says, so unexpectedly earnest that Leonard falls a little bit more in love with him just like that, barefoot in the bathroom on the heels of an exhausting fourteen-hour neural grafting with a damp hand towel slung over his shoulder and Jim beside him looking rumpled and boyish in nothing but a pair of low-slung sleep pants.</i>
</p>
  <p><i></i>His<i> sleep pants, in point of fact. He’d comment on it, but he’s distracted by the way Jim’s shoulders are finally relaxing, the fierce furrow of worry smoothing away from his brow.</i></p>
  <p>
  <i>“So I can do this?” Jim asks, seizing Leonard’s left hand in both of his and drawing it in against his bare chest.</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>Leonard thumbs at the smooth stretch of skin under Jim’s clavicle. “Mmm hmm.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“And this?” Jim raises Leonard’s hand to his lips and kisses the pad of each finger, one by one.</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“Yep.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“Good.” Jim nuzzles sideways into Leonard’s palm. “But we still have a problem.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>Leonard curves his hand to cup Jim’s cheek properly, scritches into the hair behind his ear with teasing fingertips. “Do we now?”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>Jim’s mouth twitches. “We do.” His eyes are sparkling, heavy-lashed in that way he gets to him when he’s up to no good, and Leonard decides it’s past time he made use of the other hand the Good Lord gave him.</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“What’s that, then?” Leonard hooks two fingers under the waistband of Jim’s stolen sleep pants and gives an experimental tug, curious to see whether Jim will take it as a cue to sway in closer or lose the pants. Either option suits Leonard fine.</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>Jim releases Leonard’s hand and slides his arms over Leonard’s shoulders, reels him in close enough that his breath ghosts warm over Leonard’s lips as he confesses: “I think I’m allergic to your clothes, too.”</i>
</p>
</div><p>Tucked in beside the salve is a wooden chess piece, a black king with silver detailing Leonard would know anywhere.</p>
<p>“I’ll be damned,” he mutters as he picks it up, marveling at the familiar shape and heft of it in his hand. There’s <i>that</i> mystery solved. Jim had the set custom-made while they were here to replace the one that went down with the first Enterprise, and Leonard recalls him complaining at one point shortly after they left that he’d lost a piece – mostly on account of the resulting debate with Spock over his unsentimental suggestion that the replicated replacement was substantively indistinguishable from the original and therefore the matter did not merit emotional distress.</p>
<p>Lord, did they get into it that time. Leonard was on Jim's side, of course, but as usual he lost interest in his and Spock's endless attempts to outmaneuver each other's arguments long before they'd run out of discursive steam. As disloyal as it feels to think it, those two were every bit as bad as each other when they got into one of their logical pissing contests - and yet there's not a damn thing Leonard wouldn't give to see them go at it again, just one more time.

</p>
<p>He wishes he could let Jim know he found his missing piece. The thought is painful, the hot sting of another shallow cut where he’s already so raw. Each day seems to bring more of these tiny new hurts. He’ll never get to tell Jim about the chess piece, the same way he’ll never tell him about his meeting with Paris, how surprised he was by her office, how he understands now what Jim meant about her quiet power. He’ll never bring Jim with him to Hugh and Paul’s for dinner, or take his hand like he so often felt the urge to as they crossed the bustling Central Plaza to meet everyone at the Neutral Zone. He’ll never roll his eyes while Jim tries one more time to convince him of the supposed magnificence of this station, or watch him pause on his way to an important meeting to admire the new flowers, or argue with him about whether to use the transporter station or just <i>walk</i> to the museum district like sane people and spare their atoms the upheaval.</p>
<p>He wonders, sometimes, if he’ll ever stop finding new ways to miss Jim. But that thought hurts too, a deep cold hurt that scares him a lot worse than this slow death by a thousand cuts. At least in missing Jim he still keeps a little of him, keeps a little of <i>himself</i>, all these small painful touchpoints serving as the one through-line stringing together his aimless bled-together days.

</p>
<p>What’ll be left of him when even those are gone?</p>
<p>He sets the chess piece down next to the salve and moves on to the next item in the box, a folded packet of gray fabric – a shirt, he realizes once he’s pulled it out properly, and one he recognizes immediately. He rubs the thin cotton between his fingertips, allowing himself the bittersweet indulgence of remembering how it looked draping down Jim’s chest, how it felt to touch him through it.</p>
<p></p><div>
  <p>
  <i>“I didn’t know it’d be like this.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“In a good way or a bad way?” Leonard rests his cheek against the slight curve of Jim’s shoulder and strokes a hand down his side, savoring the small tactile pleasure of soft fabric over lean muscle. He loves Jim in this shirt. Almost as much as he loves him out of it. “We don’t have to keep it if you don’t like it.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“No, I mean…” Jim reaches out and touches the gleaming marbled wood with reverent fingers, tracing over the deeply etched lines. “I never had any, before you.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“Headboards?” Leonard teases. “No kidding. Here I thought that barn you were raised in had all the fine trappings.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>Jim jabs his elbow back in a halfhearted reproach, barely making contact. “Roots, asshole.” He can’t be too aggrieved, though, as his hand finds Leonard’s where it’s come to rest on his hip, fingers twining comfortably together with the ease of practice. The other hand is still on their fancy new headboard, trailing through the intricate tangle of roots sprawling out into the bottom border of the design. “I used to think it’d feel all wrong, you know? Like being trapped. It scared me.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>Leonard slips his free hand under the loose hem of Jim’s shirt and spreads it wide and firm over the warmth of Jim’s belly. Bracing him; bracing himself. “And now?”</i>
</p>
  <p><i>“Feels right. Just right.” Jim skims his fingers back through the roots, up the trunk and out across one long crooked branch. “Like I can finally </i>be<i> something.”</i></p>
  <p>
  <i>“You were always something, kid.” Leonard kisses Jim's nape, bare and vulnerable above the neck of his shirt. “You’ve just got someplace to hang onto, now.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“Yeah.” Jim drops his hand from the headboard, turns his head so Leonard can see the curve of his smile. “I like it.”</i>
</p>
</div><p>He always loved this shirt. Jim wore the hell out of it, and it shows: the poor thing’s on its last legs, ratty and threadbare, with a gaping hole in the armpit and the bottom hem coming unraveled. Leonard can’t help but suspect that Jim “accidentally” left it behind only because he was too sentimental to just toss it down the recycling chute where it belonged.</p>
<p>Finally, at the very bottom of the box, Leonard finds the only item that really surprises him: a small PADD with an embossed delta in the upper right corner. Jim could be careless with his own belongings, but he was far more conscientious with anything work-related. It’s unlike him to have left behind a piece of Starfleet equipment, and even more unlikely that Spock would have let it happen.</p>
<p>Leonard taps the power button, not expecting anything – it’s been well over a year, the cell has to have run down – but the PADD wakes right up. A prompt appears on the screen, requesting a passcode.</p>
<p>Well, that’s a non-starter. Jim found some perverse satisfaction in coming up with elaborate passcodes, long rambling strings of numbers or symbols which no one but he or Spock would stand a chance at remembering offhand. It was bad enough when they were rooming together back at the Academy, but it quickly spiraled into true obnoxiousness after they graduated and Jim had the excuse of needing to protect sensitive Starfleet intel. There was many a night out back in San Francisco that ended with Leonard practically giving himself a damn aneurysm trying to code into Jim’s apartment, Jim cackling like a rabid hyena as he slid down the wall in a wobbly tequila-blurred heap, too tickled by Leonard’s disgruntled fumbling to lift a finger to help get them inside.</p>
<p>It sure wasn’t one of his more endearing traits, Leonard thinks, though he can’t deny the wash of fondness that rolls through him at the memory of Jim’s breathless laugh-snorting attempts to repeat the passcode – which of course would sound ever so slightly different at every recitation – and the clumsy way he’d claw his way up Leonard’s leg to finally punch in the code himself once he’d had his fill of schadenfreude. The kid never did grow out of being just a little too impressed with his own cleverness. Thank God the Enterprise was all bioencrypted, or Leonard would’ve never been able to get into their damn quarters.</p>
<p>So there’s no way in hell Leonard’s actually going to guess whatever passcode Jim slapped on this particular device, but he decides to give it a shot anyway. Might as well. He’s got nothing but time.</p>
<p>He tries a few obvious guesses first: Jim’s service number, the few door codes he can still recall from their Academy years, the registries of the Enterprise and the handful of other ships he knows off the top of his head. His own birthday, and those of all the other senior crew. (Not Jim’s; never Jim’s.) As many digits of pi as he can remember. The first several numbers of the Fibonacci sequence.</p>
<p>After a while, he runs out of real ideas and just starts stabbing in random combinations of numbers and symbols. It’s an exercise in futility, and he’s fast losing what little interest he had in the task when the screen suddenly flares to life, startling him so bad he almost drops the damn thing.</p>
<p>It takes him a few seconds to think back and recall the last string of digits he typed. <i>2255124</i>. A date, pulled at random from the depths of his memory – meaningless, he thought, but it seems his subconscious knew better.</p>
<p>2255.124. Maybe, in retrospect, the single most important day of his life: the day he arrived at the Academy, the day he joined Starfleet, the day he crawled out of the ashes of all his old failures and into a rickety shuttle seat next to some roughed-up kid with a bloodstained shirt and the bluest eyes he’d ever seen.</p>
<p>It was the day Jim joined up, too, of course. Leonard should’ve guessed it earlier.</p>
<p>The PADD has opened to the Starfleet starting menu, which is familiar, if a bit outdated, a year or so behind on the usual system updates. Leonard taps the comms icon, morbidly curious about what messages Jim may have received since Xulos, but an error message sternly advises him that access to that system has been terminated. Fair enough. It wouldn’t have been right, anyhow, reading through other folks’ weepy last missives to their departed captain. Lord knows he sent his fair share of those himself after his daddy died. He’d be mortified to know some jackass had gone snooping through them on a whim.</p>
<p>It makes sense that Starfleet would have revoked Jim’s permissions – it’s not like he needs them anymore, and they had enough trouble with tricksters and miscreants trying to exploit his security access even when he was alive – but Leonard is still slightly disappointed when he gets the same error message for each icon he tries. Data visualization, word processing, personnel files, logbook – all dead ends. (That last one is more than just slightly disappointing. He’d have liked to hear Jim’s voice again.)</p>
<p>Discouraged and annoyed with himself for getting his hopes up, he’s on the verge of throwing the PADD back in the box when it occurs to him to check the local files to see whether anything has been saved to the device itself. Probably not, given how strict Starfleet regs are on that very matter, but Jim wasn’t exactly the most stringent rule follower. There’s a chance. A minuscule chance, but better than the nothing he’s got now.</p>
<p>He swipes into the device folder, telling himself it’s a waste of time, he’s being pathetic, why would he keep doing this to himself when he knows damn well there’s not going to be anything there –</p>
<p>Except that he’s wrong. There <i>is</i> something there.</p>
<p>The folder is almost empty, save for a single file. It’s an image file, of all things, nameless and unencrypted, dated – Leonard’s breath catches – 2263.4.</p>
<p>He swallows, taps the file open, and finds himself looking down at…himself. Him and Jim, to be specific – a candid shot from Jim’s thirtieth birthday party, the two of them caught mid-conversation on a spotless white sofa, framed by the legs of other crew members milling around them.</p>
<p>Jim is laughing, lines sketching out from his eyes, loose and open after a few drinks. His upper body is angled toward Leonard, slouching against him, one arm thrown casually over Leonard’s shoulders. His other hand is blurry in motion, captured in the moment before landing a slap to Leonard’s chest.</p>
<p>Leonard’s grinning too, in on the joke. Less tipsy than Jim, but relaxed, indulgent. Happy that Jim’s happy.</p>
<p>He doesn’t recall the picture being taken. Looking at it, though, that moment comes flooding right back to him: the easy closeness of Jim’s body beside him, the new leather smell of the jackets they’d picked up earlier that day, how good it felt to see the spark back in Jim’s eyes after the long helpless months he’d spent watching him fade away.</p>
<p>The party had been a hell of a gamble. He’d been pretty sure he was doing the right thing, but not completely, not enough that he wasn’t nervous as hell right up until the second he watched Jim realize what was happening. He remembers what a relief it was to see that smile break out on Jim’s face, to have proof that he knew Jim as well as he thought he did.</p>
<p>Maybe that’s why it happened that night. Because it was a relief to Jim, too – being known.</p>
<p>Leonard understands why Jim saved this picture, blurry and imperfect as it is. He can see in it what Jim would have seen: how close the two of them are sitting, how naturally they fit together. Their uncomplicated enjoyment of each other’s company, joking and comfortable, apart from the crowd.</p>
<p>Looking at this snapshot from that night, Leonard can’t help but think, as Jim must have, of what came after.</p>
<p>They stuck around the party a couple hours longer, somehow managing to stick together as their conversational circle expanded and contracted through various permutations. Leonard was all set to babysit, keep Jim’s drunk ass out of trouble and shepherd him safely home at the end of the night as he had so many times before, but Jim stopped drinking after those first few, and by the time they wandered back toward the officers’ wing shortly before midnight, he was sober as a judge. Still happy, though; still relaxed and upbeat and <i>there</i> in a way he hadn’t been for months.</p>
<p>He invited Leonard back to his suite for one last drink, and Leonard went – because it was still the kid’s birthday, because he’d nearly lost him <i>again</i> not twenty-four hours before, but mostly because, all other things being equal, he’d always choose a room with Jim in it over any other.</p>
<p>Which is why it was here, right here on this very couch, that he felt Jim’s mouth against his for the first time: soft, bourbon-sweet, inexplicably familiar.</p>
<p>Jim was the one to lean in for the kiss, and the one to end it, slowly pulling back to study Leonard’s reaction. Leonard can still picture every last detail of Jim’s face in that moment, the memory as sharp and vivid as any photo or hologram: the bow of his lips, slightly parted; his hair wilting down over his forehead; the piercing electric blue of his eyes; the purpled smudge of that damn shiner he’d stubbornly refused to let Leonard fix – because he may have been an older and wiser man, the pride of Starfleet, a legend in the making whose name and exploits were already exalted throughout the Federation, but he was still a little bit of that bullheaded unruly live wire who stepped onto the shuttle at Riverside, too. And that was just fine. Leonard loved them both. Loved all of Jim, all he’d ever been and all he might become, and loved most of all the man he was in that long weightless moment between the first kiss and the second, clear-eyed and hopeful, offering up something Leonard hadn’t known he was allowed to want.</p>
<p>If Leonard had thought about it before that moment, he’d probably have said he loved Jim as much as anyone could love another person. He’d built a whole life around him, followed him out into the black, broken his oath and the laws of nature and damn near sacrificed his career on the altar of Jim’s heartbeat. He’d never devoted himself so entirely to someone before, not even to Jocelyn. There wasn’t a single aspect of his days that didn’t lead back to Jim one way or another: his captain, his best friend, his foremost and most challenging patient.</p>
<p>He’d have said, too, that he <i>knew</i> Jim, knew him better than anyone. From a medical standpoint alone, after years of putting him back together, it was safe to say he knew Jim’s body better than Jim himself did. He knew every scar and suspect mole, knew the typical ranges for all Jim’s vitals at rest and under stress and when he wouldn’t admit he was coming down with something, knew his pupillary distance down to the millimeter and the exact size and shape of his regrown liver. He knew his medical record backward and forward and inside out, and knew a whole lot more it didn’t say, like why there was a two-year gap back in his teens and that he didn’t really fall out of a tree the first time he broke his arm.</p>
<p>He knew the faint tremor Jim would get in his hand when his blood sugar was dropping, and the vein that would start throbbing at his temple when he was worked up over something. He knew the particular straightness of Jim’s spine when he was feeling ganged up on and the set of his jaw when he was about to make a decision he wasn’t sure was the right one. He knew how to tell when Jim was lying, when he was embarrassed, when he needed to let off some steam. He knew the subtle differences between a hundred different smiles.</p>
<p>He even knew things he wasn’t supposed to know, like the fact that Jim had applied for the vice-admiral position here at Yorktown. (He’d also known Jim wouldn’t take it in the end – though he had quietly reached out his old research partner and newly appointed station CMO to test the waters about possible opportunities, just to hedge his bets. No way in hell was he going to risk getting left behind by himself on that flying deathtrap.)</p>
<p>So he knew Jim, and he loved him, and he really and truly thought that was as far as it went – as far as it <i>could</i> go. Just ten seconds before that kiss, he would have said that he couldn’t possibly love Jim more, couldn’t know him any better.</p>
<p>He was a fool. All his knowledge, all his love, and he’d forgotten the number one rule of life with Jim Kirk: there was always something new.</p>
<p></p><div>
  <p><i>Jim breathes out a tiny noise as their lips connect for a second time – a sigh, or a moan, or a gasp, Leonard can’t tell, but it’s the sweetest sound he’s ever heard, a small delicate thing all for him. He wants to hear it again. Jim’s jaw fits so perfectly into the cradle of his hand, and Jim’s breath is hot against his lips as he kisses that silk-soft mouth open, and somewhere between Jim’s nose pressing into his cheek and Jim’s bent leg trapped between them on the couch there are words bubbling up inside him that he’s said a thousand times before but never meant the way he’d mean them now: </i>Jim<i>, and </i>yes<i>, and </i>thank you, thank you<i>.</i></p>
</div><p>He’d had no idea. Nearly eight years he’d spent at Jim’s side, perfectly satisfied, never realizing what he was missing, but that one kiss was all it took to rewrite everything he thought he needed. From the first taste he was starving for it, out of his goddamn mind with want for Jim’s touch and his pleasure and the unbridled ferocity of his love, and Jim – well, Jim just dove in headfirst, the way he always did once he committed himself to something, giving himself over so wholly and unconditionally that it left Leonard breathless, awestruck, <i>humbled</i>.</p>
<p>There was so much of Jim still to learn, to discover, all of it new and better and more. There was the wet velvet heat of his mouth, the flushed-warm rasp of his unshaven cheek against Leonard’s palm. There were the sighs that escaped him sometimes in the middle of the night, his face tucked against Leonard’s shoulder, his fingers twitching reflexively on Leonard’s belly. There was the sleek grace of his long body folding down to straddle Leonard’s lap, and the idle way he’d fidget with one of Leonard’s hands sometimes when they were sacked out on the couch together, bending and unbending his fingers, tapping patterns on his knuckles, tracing over the lines in his palm.</p>
<p>Leonard had always been a good student, and the case study of James Tiberius Kirk was by far the most fascinating he’d ever encountered. He could have filled whole volumes of medical journals with the things he learned in those first few months – that was, if he’d had the least interest in sharing, which he decidedly did not. Not when so much of the joy of it was in knowing he had all those pieces and parts of Jim to himself.</p>
<p>He learned how to touch Jim to tease him, to urge him on, to make him shake, to draw out a moan or a whine or a plea in the shape of his name.</p>
<p>He learned that Jim would start biting at his lips when he was getting close, and that he didn’t realize he was doing it – he’d gasp in such pretty surprise when Leonard kissed him or gave him a couple fingers to suck on, like it hadn’t occurred to him until just then that it was something he wanted.</p>
<p>He learned that some of Jim’s happy noises could veer alarmingly close to his “writhing in mortal agony” noises, which scared the living shit out of him at first and then made him dread the next time Jim was brought to medbay, for more than just the usual reasons.</p>
<p></p><div>
  <p>
  <i>“Bones, you kinky motherfucker,” Jim says admiringly, because of course he would be delighted by any opportunity to make Leonard’s job more difficult. “I didn’t know you had it in you.”</i>
</p>
  <p><i>“I </i>don’t<i>,” Leonard snaps, “this is </i>your<i> problem, you damn deviant, I’m not the one who gets all…all…”</i></p>
  <p>
  <i>“All?” Jim prompts, blinking at him with exaggerated innocence even as his hand wanders south again, and Leonard concludes that it’ll be easier to show than to tell.</i>
</p>
</div><p>He learned that there were smiles he’d never seen before, grateful and sultry and sleep-goofy smiles, smiles that could bring a tear to his eye or lure him back to bed despite his best intentions, smiles so complex and delicately shaded with meaning that he gave up trying to keep them all straight in his head.</p>
<p>He learned that Jim’s nightmares were sneaking, quiet things, so artfully insidious that he’d never been aware of one in all the time he and Jim had shared a dorm room. It was only after he started sleeping with Jim wrapped all around him that he came to recognize the signs: the sudden tension in Jim’s muscles, the change in his breathing, the fluttery tremor of his heart jackrabbiting in his chest. He learned that, given enough time, Jim would bolt awake in wide-eyed silence and then spend the rest of the night huddled miserably against Leonard’s side, inconsolable, unwilling or unable to talk about it – but he also learned that if he caught it before it got to that point, he could usually settle Jim down just by rubbing his back a while, easing the tension out of him with slow sweeps of his hand until Jim lay boneless and peaceful in his arms.</p>
<p>He learned all of that and more, and he learned about himself, too – how neatly his hands fit around the angles of Jim’s hips, how sensitive his scalp was to the gentle scratch of Jim’s blunt nails, how easily he could drift off to sleep half-suffocated under the weight of another grown man.</p>
<p>He learned he’d been wrong all those years, assuming that he wasn’t meant for the kind of once-in-a-lifetime romance some other people were lucky enough to find, that he was too jaded and bitter for another bite at the apple. He’d just been waiting for Jim, that was <a href="https://youtu.be/4EelCVkex4c">all</a>.</p>
<p>He learned that he was more than capable of keeping Jim happy, giving him everything he needed, because somehow, miraculously, who he was was exactly who Jim wanted. Jim always had seemed to like him a hell of a lot more than he liked himself, seen more in him than he knew how to see, and if years of head trauma and oxygen deprivation had brought the man to the point of truly believing that Leonard in any way deserved him, then who was Leonard to argue?</p>
<p>Being with Jim felt like the most obvious, natural thing in the world, as if they’d spent all the years leading up to it laying the groundwork without even realizing, adjusting and adapting to each other, so that when the time came the pieces slid home effortlessly, a perfect fit, stable and strong as a deep-rooted oak tree. It was amazing to Leonard how good they were together, how <i>easy</i> it was.</p>
<p>Amazing, too, to find that there was still room for his love to grow – that one heart could contain an entire universe, infinite and yet ever-expanding, creating space for itself where before there was nothing at all.</p>
<p>Yeah. Leonard knows why Jim kept the picture.</p>
<p>He touches a fingertip to the screen and grazes a slow path down Jim’s frozen, laughing face: the lines at his eye, the pulled-tight apple of his cheek, his tilted jaw. He traces down Jim’s neck, following the hidden route of his carotid artery</p>
<p></p><div>
  <p><i>“Bones,” Jim groans, fingers twisting in Leonard’s hair, hips stuttering against Leonard’s thigh, head tilting back to expose more of that beautiful throat to Leonard’s teeth, “Bones, </i>oh<i> – ”</i></p>
</div><p>and pauses at the hollow of his throat, framed by his jacket collar and the rounded v-neck of his shirt.</p>
<p>The very same shirt that’s sitting next to Leonard in a threadbare heap.</p>
<p>Leonard tosses the PADD back into the box like it’s burned him, not bothering to turn it off first. The too-big hurt in his chest suddenly feels like it’s doubled in size, creaking against his ribs, pressing up into his throat, and he can’t stay a minute longer in this room – this cold, sterile, anonymous room without Jim in it.</p>
<p>He walks straight out of the suite, down the hall and into the lift, through the lobby when he reaches it and out the front door, past the laughing strangers lingering out front and the planters with their lush flower displays that are as out of place in this floating hard-edged snow globe as he is, and when he gets to the road he picks a direction at random, not bothering to worry where it’ll take him. After all, it doesn’t matter which way he chooses; if he goes far enough, he’ll end up at the Central Plaza eventually. He can stop in at the Neutral Zone for a drink, maybe comm Hugh to see if he’s up for grabbing a late dinner after his shift ends.</p>
<p>What he can’t do is think about what comes after that, tomorrow, the next day, all the weeks and months and years still to come. A whole lifetime left to get through without anyone to sit too close to him on couches or kiss the pads of his fingers one by one or see more in him than he knows how to see.</p>
<p>He senses eyes on him, glances around and spots a couple officers he recognizes from the Salcombe on a bench up ahead. They seem like they might be thinking about coming over to him, and he quickly looks away, pretends not to have noticed them, because if he hears one word about the great Captain Kirk right now he’s going to fucking <i>scream</i>.</p>
<p>He can’t look at them as he hurries past, can’t look behind him, doesn’t yet know how to look forward, so instead he looks up at the inverted rings of Yorktown curving overhead, glittering with the lights of ten million strangers’ lives. It’s a sight that never fails to take his breath away: that unnatural tangle of streets, looping and paradoxical, all ending up in the same place.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>A chapter in which I repeatedly told canon to go hang. A few quick points:</p>
<p>1. Paris is referred to as a commodore in <i>Beyond</i>, but a) she's wearing admiral rank stripes and b) it's implied that the vice-admiral would answer to her. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it's a goll-damn admiral.</p>
<p>2. Hugh and Leonard would totally be friends if their paths had crossed (which they could have in the Kelvin timeline!), a point about which I am not accepting constructive criticism at this or any other time.</p>
<p>3. Supposedly they're pre-replicator and still using food synthesizers at this point in AOS, but I'm calling bullshit, <i>specifically</i> because of Yorktown. A damn snow globe in space with no arable land that we can see (outside of the <a href="https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Yorktown#Technical_data">canonical</a> “parks/nature zone” which so vexes Leonard), no livestock, no natural resources at all - and yet they're somehow sustaining millions of residents <i>and</i> serving as a resupply point? Come on. The only way Yorktown could function as shown would be if they had some kind of hyper-efficient recycling technology where you could stick in your apple cores and chicken bones and worn-out shoes on one end and get out fancy booze and Constitution-class starship parts and matching leather jackets on the other. You know, <i>like a replicator</i>.</p>
<p>Tune in next week for more trivial details of AOS canon I've put way too much thought into! (Just kidding. Next week's chapter is actually the shortest in the whole fic - but somehow I don't think you'll want to miss it.)</p>
<p>♥</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Chapter 5</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Before you do anything, <a href="https://jimbotkirk.tumblr.com/post/643654684496773120/oh-god-promise-me-ill-survive-this-misery-burn-me">please check out this INCREDIBLE art</a> that <a href="https://jimbotkirk.tumblr.com">@jimbotkirk</a> made of the final scene in Chapter 1. Is that not the dopest and also most painful shit you've ever seen??? Go show this amazing art some love!</p>
<p>And now, on to the show.</p>
<p>Warnings for language, grief, depression, and discussion of medical trauma and death.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Leonard’s eyes <i>fly</i> open.</p>
<p>He stares into the darkness, heart pounding wildly in his chest, pulse rushing in his ears, every muscle tensed as he searches the shadows for the thing that triggered this dry-mouthed rush of adrenaline: invader, explosion, the wail of red alert.</p>
<p>But – no. There are no crew to call down an alarm, and the ship is quiet, humming peacefully without a trace of hissing or crackling or sputtering. And no footsteps or other signs of an unwelcome guest, thank God. Only a true maniac would attack a tiny ship like this one, plodding along alone out in the middle of Bumfuck Nowhere. </p>
<p>He closes his eyes, exhaling a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. Damn. Must’ve been some dream he had. Or was it a nightmare? He can’t remember. </p>
<p>His arm is numb where it’s flung up at an awkward angle next to his head – a habit he hasn’t managed to kick yet, his body instinctively making space for another to curl up alongside. He shakes it out, grimacing as he registers the pressure in his bladder. Whatever it was that roused him, he’s awake enough now to know he won’t be able to fall back asleep without doing something about that, so he grudgingly heaves himself out of his bunk and shuffles stiffly to the head.</p>
<p>He keeps the lights down, hoping to maintain whatever semblance of drowsiness he’s still got. He doesn’t need them, anyway. The ship’s living area is a fraction of the size of his old quarters on the Enterprise, and he’s well used to navigating the cramped space with only the faint blue glow of console lights from the cockpit to guide him.</p>
<p>The floor is cold under his feet, flat and smooth with a barely detectable indent under his left heel where two tiles meet. Best to focus on that, simple physical sensation – the cold along his feet, the wall at his elbow, the not-quite-painful tightness in his lower back, the thrum of the ship around him – so that his mind doesn’t start wandering to more complex thoughts, like how hard and uncomfortable his bunk is compared to the last bed he called his own, or how much chill will have crept into his sheets by the time he gets between them again, or the sleepy little questioning noise Jim would let out sometimes when Leonard slid back into bed, startled but pleased, the sound melting into a huff of hot breath against Leonard’s neck as he cuddled up against him –</p>
<p>Fuck.</p>
<p>Leonard squeezes his eyes shut in the dark. The cold floor. The humming ship.</p>
<p>
  <i>Fuck.</i>
</p>
<p>He’s halfway back to bed when he kicks into something, <i>hard</i>, shocking a yelp out of him as pain flares through his toes and the thing goes skidding noisily across the floor. <i>Jesus.</i> He cusses a blue streak as he scrunches and shakes his foot, trying to dislodge the hurt, and glares accusingly down at the floor. There ought to be a clear path between the head and his bunk. What could he have found to injure himself with?</p>
<p>He can’t see worth a damn in this light, so he crouches down and paws around for the mystery object, squinting against the gloom, until finally he spies a small boxy shape over near the wall. He can’t make out what it is. “Computer, lights at…”</p>
<p>And then he realizes.</p>
<p>It’s the recorder. Jim’s log recorder.</p>
<p>How the hell did it get down there? It was on the desk the last time he noticed it, tucked in between his drive and the box from Yorktown. Maybe the ship passed through something that shook her up some? That could have been what woke him.</p>
<p>Frowning, Leonard reaches out to put the recorder back in its place – only to flinch away the same second he makes contact, his hand jerking back reflexively, as if from a red-hot stove.</p>
<p>The recorder isn’t hot. But it is <i>warm</i>. Like it’s just been turned off.</p>
<p>He hasn’t touched it since he left Yorktown.</p>
<p>“The fuck…?” he mutters.</p>
<p>He reaches for the recorder again, hesitantly this time. It’s definitely warm, all right, the whole device giving off an unmistakable mechanical heat, soothing against his cold skin. He wraps both hands around it, chasing the tiny comfort.</p>
<p>His finger finds the play button automatically, clicks it down, and…nothing. There’s no sound, no light. The recorder remains silent in his hands, unresponsive.</p>
<p>Because the power cell’s dead. Shit, that’s right – it ran down ages ago, and he never bothered recharging it. Never needed to, since he uploaded the file to the ship computer back when he first came aboard.</p>
<p>But the recorder is <i>warm</i>. Noticeably so, a stark contrast to the biting chill of the floor beneath his feet.</p>
<p>He stares at it, struggling to make sense of the contradiction, even as a shivery wave of goosebumps prickles up his arms.</p>
<p>He remembers, now, what startled him earlier. He was lying in his bunk, thoughts drifting while he waited for the oblivion of sleep, hoping idly for another dull dreamless night to carry him forward into his next dull senseless day, and some automatic system of the ship ticked on with its usual loud whirring, which shapeshifted in his half-aware mind into the sound of wind, sweeping him sideways into a memory</p>
<p>(spiderwebs of light against a roiling sky<br/>
the abyss yawning wide at his feet, the same vast impenetrable black of a starless void, deep and dark and infinite as the emptiness cracking open in his chest<br/>
a little yellow light blink blink blinking down in the mud<br/>
<i>Bones?)</i></p>
<p>and then the jolting thunderclap clatter of something hitting the floor.</p>
<p>He sinks forward onto his knees, looks up from the recorder to gaze into the darkness all around him.</p>
<p>Says, very quietly: “Jim?”</p>
<p>There’s no answer.</p>
<p>Of course there’s no goddamn answer. He’s the only person on this ship, probably the only life sign for ten thousand light-years in any direction, and Jim is <i>dead</i>.</p>
<p>He’s losing his mind. That’s what this is. He’s seen it a hundred times if he’s seen it once, and maybe this is some kind of karmic payback for all that. Maybe he’s finally getting his just deserts for all the patients he’s failed to save over the years, the family members he’s had to humor as they confided in hushed tones about the loved one they insisted was still with them somehow. It’s a tale as old as time, those left behind driven by their grief to invent stories, to imagine whispers and specters, to see what they want to see rather than what’s real. Their ghosts linger in cold spots in their hallways, rearrange their cupboards, rattle their bedroom doors, speak to them in dreams, protect them from harm.</p>
<p>The details may vary, but the basic premise is always the same: <i>The dead are still with us. The end isn’t really the end. Love is more powerful than even death.</i></p>
<p>Well, it’s not. And if those true believers had pronounced as many of those kindly old nanas and doting husbands and innocent children as Leonard had, they’d understand that too.</p>
<p></p><div>
  <p>
  <i>“Oh, come on. Now you’re sounding like Spock.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>Leonard pauses mid-pour and shoots a look over his shoulder. “If you’re gonna get nasty, I’m gonna leave.” Jim smirks at him, and Leonard shakes his head, caps the whiskey bottle and sits back on the couch with drink in hand, kicking his heels up on the coffee table. “Look, all I’m saying is that every bit of so-called ‘evidence’ is either unsubstantiated or purely anecdotal, and confirmation bias is a hell of a thing. Show me a peer-reviewed meta-analysis supporting the possibility of postmortem existence, then we’ll talk.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“But you’re still thinking of existence as something that’s tied to a body,” Jim argues. “Something that can be measured and quantified and assessed against the null. We’re more than that, though, aren’t we? Our thoughts, our feelings, our hopes and dreams, everything that really makes us who we are – that’s not just biochemical processes. There’s more to us than that. Otherwise we’d just be machines.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>Leonard could easily argue back against that: even the most basic medical tricorder can detect and analyze various forms of cognitive activity – hell, the tech they’ve got in medbay could practically tell you what you’re thinking about having for breakfast tomorrow – and there are perfectly sound empirical neurobiological explanations for everything Jim just listed. But there’s something off about the way Jim’s pressing his case, the words missing his usual rhetorical gusto. Leonard’s got a nagging feeling this isn’t just another lighthearted debate over the reductive shortcomings of positivism. “What’s this about, kid? You’re a good half a bottle too early for this sort of ruminating. Something’s eating at you.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>Jim doesn’t answer right away, which only confirms to Leonard that this conversation is no idle thought experiment. He looks away, down into his lap where he’s been fidgeting with a loose thread on his jeans. “I don’t remember anything,” he says quietly.</i>
</p>
  <p><i>Leonard’s stomach turns over. </i>Oh.<i></i></p>
  <p>
  <i>“You’d think I would, right?” Jim says, still avoiding Leonard’s eyes, staring down at where his fingers are fussing at the thread. “If there were something after?”</i>
</p>
  <p><i>“Maybe you weren’t…” Leonard hesitates, the word stuck nauseously in his throat. “…out, long enough. Or maybe it’s not something you </i>can<i> remember, after…after coming back.”</i></p>
  <p>
  <i>Jim smiles a little, thin and humorless. “You don’t really believe that.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>He doesn’t. But he can’t bear the sight of that empty-eyed smile on Jim’s face, hollow and brittle as an eggshell. He’d swear the damn tooth fairy were real, and unicorns and Santa Claus too, if only it would do something about that awful smile.</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“You’ve got time,” he says instead, because this, at least, he can say with conviction. “Plenty of time. Years and years ahead of you. I’ll make sure of that, even if you can’t be bothered.”</i>
</p>
  <p><i>Jim slants a sideways glance Leonard’s way, a hint of something real creeping into his eyes. “Wow, scotch really softens you up, huh? That was only like </i>half<i> an insult.”</i></p>
  <p>
  <i>“I mean it, Jim. You can’t go tying yourself in knots worrying about questions nobody's got an answer for. Won’t change a thing one way or the other, just make you crazy along the way.” Leonard claps a hand down on Jim’s shoulder, gives him a good rough squeeze so he won’t think he’s being coddled. “Life’s for the living, kid, and that’s a fact. All any of us can do is make the most of the time we have.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>Jim breathes out sharply through his nose, arching a wry eyebrow as he sips his drink. “I don’t know if I’m doing such a hot job of that, either.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
    <i>Leonard hates seeing him like this. Hates that he can’t do more for him than lend a sympathetic ear and try to steady him through his darker moments. It feels like every day Jim fades away a little more, the outsized muchness of him shrinking down to something dim and small, harder for Leonard to get at. He has no idea what he’ll do if the day comes when he can’t reach him at all.</i>
  </p>
  <p>
  <i>“You’ve been working too hard,” he says with all the gruff confidence he can muster, as much for his own sake as Jim’s. “You need to unplug for a spell. And you need to get off this damn ship while you’re at it. It ain’t natural being stuck in this glorified fishbowl for months at a time. You’ll be a new man after a few days of leave, I guarantee it.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“Yeah,” Jim says vaguely, not sounding terribly convinced. He takes another sip of scotch, attempts a weak smile that still doesn’t reach his eyes. “Yeah, you’re right. Maybe I’ll feel different after Yorktown.”</i>
</p>
</div><p>Leonard’s a doctor, not a philosopher. He’s done his time in some of the busiest trauma centers in the Federation. He <i>knows</i> death, knows the grim unpretty reality of it better than anyone should have to – has fought with it, danced with it, coaxed and negotiated and dug his heels in against it. Lost to it. He’s seen the light fade from too many patients’ eyes while he was still battling like hell to save them, seen the fear and the pain and the desperate cling to life drain out of them as surely and inexorably as the ebb of the tide. Love, courage, promise – none of it can keep a soul tethered to this world once their clock’s ticked over. A man may be more than his body, but when the body goes, that’s it, game over.</p>
<p>It’s not Leonard’s place to speculate about what might become of those souls after their time is up, but there’s not a lick of true evidence for any kind of afterlife here on this plane. All those fanciful ideas about spirits and murmurs from beyond the grave are coping mechanisms, nothing more - a comforting lie to shield broken hearts from the hard, ugly truth of a world that can take anyone from you at any time, no give-backs, no second chances.</p>
<p>Leonard knows all this, dammit. He knows better.</p>
<p>And yet.</p>
<p>And yet the recorder <i>is</i> warm. Warmer than there’s any logical explanation for.</p>
<p>And yet it <i>did</i> fall off the desk, while the box from Yorktown doesn’t seem to have budged an inch.</p>
<p>Leonard closes his eyes, trying to sink back into the scene that chased him awake. The crackling sky. The abyss opening up at his feet, black and infinite. Jim’s voice, wind-muffled, pleading.</p>
<p>
  <i>Bones?</i>
</p>
<p>Leonard knows better, he does, but still he stays on the floor for a long time, alone in the dark, cradling the recorder in his hands as the warmth slowly fades from its rounded <a href="https://youtu.be/DzhlVDY0DSE">edges</a>.</p>
<p>It’s impossible.</p>
<p>And yet…so was Jim.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>
  <a href="https://www.letraslibres.com/mexico-espana/como-quien-oye-llover">♥</a>
</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Chapter 6</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Before we get into it, I have to warn you that this chapter describes a fictional pandemic which occurred some years prior on a Federation colony. I wrote most of it in the Before Times, and I'm sure you'll be able to tell it was more heavily inspired by Ebola than SARS; however, you will likely also be able to tell that it has since been informed by my experiences and those of others working in healthcare and public health during the COVID-19 pandemic. Fiction is an escape for many of us right now, and if this starts causing you the bad kind of stress, feel free to skip to the last section. You can even message me on Tumblr and I’ll run down the main points of the chapter for you.</p>
<p>So with that in mind, consider this a warning for the sort of content you'd expect to go along with a pandemic, including one scene's fairly graphic description of a ravaging illness. Additional warnings for language, grief, and depression.</p>
<p>...boy, I really give y'all the hard sell, don't I? "READ MY STORY! IT'S FULL OF NIGHTMARES!" For what it's worth, this chapter also has charmingly free-range children and a genuine smile or two from Leonard. So, you know. It's a mixed bag.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Leonard is sitting in the cockpit with a mug of shitty replicated coffee, looking over the route the AI has plotted for the next stretch of his journey, when he notices a name he hasn’t thought of in a long, long time: Jhonta.</p>
<p>If he’s being honest with himself, he’s looking for a distraction. He’s been feeling rather foolish since the recorder incident, embarrassed by his readiness to snatch at the first fleeting prospect of paranormal nonsense after a lifetime of thinking himself above all that. The apparent fickleness of his long-held convictions makes him cringe, but he tries not to beat himself up too much over it: grief is a complicated beast, and he’s hardly immune to the yearning for reconnection which feeds all that mystical horseshit. The business with the recorder was a moment of midnight confusion, that’s all, hazy with the tug of over-credulous dream logic. The sort of thing he might have laughed off later if it didn’t hurt so damn bad.</p>
<p>In fact, the more he’s thought on it, the more he’s come to question if he was even fully awake. That dreamy sense of instinctive action, the rising confusion and the terrible disoriented anxiety of being jostled back into a reality that didn’t make sense – it’s all unfortunately familiar to him, though it’s been decades since the last time he found himself standing dazed in his grandparents’ backyard with a ladle or hairbrush in his hand, Gramps’s hands firm on his shoulders, Granny fussing behind him, <i>just leave him be, Tom, you know you’re not meant to –</i></p>
<p>
  <i>Oh, hogwash, that’s just old wives’ tales. Ain’t that right, Lenny? You’re right as rain, huh? Look at you, rustling around out here like an armadillo in the flowerbeds. We gonna have to start locking you up in the shed at night, son?</i>
</p>
<p>Sleepwalking or not, it’s obvious to him now that his judgment was impaired. That otherworldly awareness he thought he felt was nothing more than a mirage, a drowsy psychological fluke of one type or another. Years of practicing medicine have taught him that the human brain’s not half as smart as it thinks it is, and a good deal more suggestible. He can forgive himself for one late-night moment of weakness.</p>
<p>He's feeling a bit antsy, though, so when he sees that his route will be taking him close to Jhonta, he wonders if maybe he shouldn’t stop there for a day or two, just to get off the ship for a while. Get the stink blown off him, as his mama would say.</p>
<p>He’s never actually set foot on the planet itself. Jim was the only one to get beamed down, in flagrant violation of the quarantine order that had been issued in response to the outbreak of a hellishly virulent hemorrhagic fever which had swept across the whole inhabited territory in a matter of days. The USS Carter was on her way, bearing the Fleet’s top emergency response team and some of their finest virologists, epidemiologists, and physicians, and while they waited for the medship’s arrival the Enterprise had strict orders to beam down all the aid and medical supplies they could produce, to offer what assistance they could by comm, and to <i>stay the hell off the planet</i>.</p>
<p>Leonard’s not sure he ever saw Jim more worked up over an order from Command. He was <i>livid</i>, hot righteous outrage laced with dangerous threads of something rawer, something maybe only Leonard knew for what it was. He couldn’t abide the thought of being so close to all those sick, suffering people and not doing more to help them.</p>
<p>Leonard hated it too; of course he did. It went against every instinct he had as a doctor, but he knew when he was outmatched. The disease was presenting with an eighty percent mortality rate, and until the medship arrived, there was nothing any of them could do in person for the people of Jhonta that would justify the immense risk to the hundreds of crew members on board the Enterprise – and it was those lives for which, at the end of the day, both Leonard and Jim were most directly responsible.</p>
<p>It took a herculean joint effort from Leonard and Spock to keep Jim on the ship: not by lecturing him about their orders, but by convincing him that inserting themselves into the disaster wouldn’t accomplish a damn thing except putting their whole crew in danger and making more work for the Carter. They didn’t have anything like the right equipment and protective gear to handle this kind of outbreak, to say nothing of training. A handful of hazmat suits and sterilizers wouldn’t go far against a pandemic registering hundreds of new cases every day. They couldn’t be in fifty places at once, the way the virus was. They were more useful in an advisory capacity, strategizing with local governments to contain the worst of the outbreak and prioritize limited resources.</p>
<p>And for a while, that tactic worked. The whole senior crew pretty much lived in Jim’s ready room those first terrible days, liaising between the Jhontese and the Carter, serving as a communication hub for all the reports and pleas for assistance coming in from across the colony, supporting the construction of field hospitals and emergency shelters, coordinating distribution of the supplies they were beaming down as fast the replicators could fabricate them, and advising on protocols for everything from cluster containment to food allocation to body disposal.</p>
<p>For his part, Leonard spent just about every minute of the day on the comm with one desperate soul after another: terrified teenage assistants forced to step into their late mentor’s shoes as a settlement’s leading health expert, laypeople with no idea where to begin triaging crowds of their sick and dying neighbors, overwhelmed community leaders struggling to do right by their people.</p>
<p>It was hell, an absolute living hell, and they weren’t even down in the thick of it. That was the one comfort Leonard had, the solace he clung to like a goddamn security blanket even as his heart felt like it might buckle under the weight of the lives he couldn’t save and the pain he couldn’t assuage. It was gruesome and endless and exhausting and so goddamn unfair, an unrelenting crush of horror and tragedy that made him wonder sometimes why the fuck he even became a doctor if this was the best he could do for these people, but at least Christine and Spock and Uhura and the others were safe in their makeshift command center, hanging together as best they could. At least Jim was there with them, drawn and clench-jawed but still the leader they needed, tireless and unwavering, moving in a constant circuit from station to station, a steadying presence in the midst of so much uncertainty and despair.</p>
<p>And then they lost contact with Yaha.</p>
<p>One of the smallest and most remote settlements, Yaha had been hit especially hard by the pandemic, and Leonard feared the worst when their head councilor stopped answering his comm. There were rumors spreading that the village had been hit by a flash flood, but Yaha was a tiny, isolated place a million miles from nowhere, hard to reach even under ideal conditions, and no one had been able to make contact with them to find out how bad the damage was. No one knew if there was even anyone left to make contact <i>with</i>, if there were any survivors or if the whole town had been wiped clean off the map like people were saying.</p>
<p>There was no reasoning with Jim after that. </p>
<p>There might have been a handful of others stupid enough to go along with him – Leonard among them, because God help him, he’d promised to follow Jim anywhere and that meant <i>anywhere</i> – but Jim outright forbade anyone else from accompanying him.</p>
<p></p><div>
  <p>
  <i>“Do as I say, not as I do,” he says sharply, cutting Leonard off mid-argument. He’s using his captain voice now, steely and unyielding. “That’s an order.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“Captain – ”</i>
</p>
  <p>
    <i>“Jim – ”</i>
  </p>
  <p>
  <i>“Comm me when the Carter arrives.” He claps Spock briskly on the shoulder, then turns to do the same to Leonard, only in Leonard’s case he leaves his gloved hand there for a second and says more quietly, back to being Jim: “Don’t freak out, okay? I’ll be careful.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“Jim,” Leonard says again, helplessly, unable to find the words that might get across how infinitely more valuable Jim’s life is to him compared against a dozen strangers, a hundred, a thousand – and it’s too late, anyway, because Jim is already bounding up onto the transporter pad, disappearing in a spiral of light.</i>
</p>
</div><p>By the time all was said and done, Jim had saved more than fifty stranded settlers, men and women and sickly little children, and thanks to the arrival of the medship, most of them even went on to survive the pandemic. Even so, it took Leonard a long while to forgive him for that particular stunt – because Jim may have satisfied his own conscience, earned himself another medal and a couple more pages in the books they’ll write about him someday, but he sure as shit didn’t follow through on his promise to be careful, and two days after going planetside he got beamed onto the Carter with a ripped hazmat suit and a raging case of what would later be formally designated Jhontese hemorrhagic fever.</p>
<p>Needless to say, Leonard’s memories of Jhonta aren’t exactly fond. But he’s been out in the black for a while now; it might do him good to plant his feet on solid ground for a spell. And he can’t help but think that if Jim were with him, he’d want to stop in, see how the survivors are doing.</p>
<p>Jim damn near died for those people. Leonard may as well go make sure it was worth it.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>His first impression of Yaha is fairly grim. The fields surrounding the settlement are bleak and lifeless, the black earth overgrown in places with weedy-looking scrub and tangles of bristling, wiry briars. There’s not a speck of color to be found, nor a single grain of the wheat that’s one of Jhonta’s staple foods and its sole export.</p>
<p>Jesus. <i>This</i> is what Jim spent a week vomiting blood for?</p>
<p>All right, fine, maybe he’s being too quick to judge. The land is clearly arable, or else the colonists wouldn’t have stayed here as long as they have. It must be the off season now. Winter, if the ship's temperature readings are any indication.</p>
<p>He touches down a ways outside the village, not wanting to stir up too much of a ruckus right off the bat. When he emerges from the ship, though, he realizes it may be too late for that, as he can see a group of what look like children hightailing it across the fields, headed his way and closing in fast.</p>
<p>Ready or not, here comes the welcoming committee, he supposes.</p>
<p>He waves at the group, making his way down the steps so he’s not lording over them from above when they get close enough to talk. It doesn’t seem to help much – they all skid to an abrupt stop several meters away, bunching together in a lopsided cluster and gaping at him with undisguised interest. There are seven or eight of them, mostly human, grubby-faced and scuff-kneed with that distinctive strain of chaotic untidiness unique to kids. They look healthy enough at first glance: full cheeks, plenty of energy, no obvious signs of deprivation or illness. They’re bundled up well against the chill, scarves and head wraps fastened with the kind of unbudgeable knotting that betrays the involvement of at least one attentive adult.</p>
<p>So far, so good.</p>
<p>“Hey there,” Leonard calls. His voice grates out raspy enough to spook even the bravest little tyke, and he hastily clears his throat, clearing out the cobwebs. “Y’all can come closer if you want. I don’t bite.”</p>
<p>The children huddle even tighter together and fall to whispering, probably debating whether the mysterious stranger can be taken at his word, or quite possibly questioning why the prospect of biting has been brought into the equation at all. Leonard never has had the greatest instincts when it comes to cross-cultural communication.</p>
<p>He’s weighing his odds of having a pitchfork-wielding mob called down on him when one little girl suddenly breaks from the pack and makes a beeline for the ship. She marches right over to where Leonard’s stood at the bottom of the steps and stares up at him with big brown eyes, clearly taking his measure.</p>
<p>“Who are you?” she demands.</p>
<p>Leonard crouches down to her level and smiles at her. “I’m Leonard. What’s your name?”</p>
<p>“Hawa,” she says, with a cautious answering smile. She’s missing a couple front teeth. Cute kid.</p>
<p>“Well, it’s real nice to meet you, Hawa. How old are you, darlin’?”</p>
<p>“Seven,” she says. “How old are you, Mr. Leonard?”</p>
<p>“Older than seven,” Leonard says dryly.</p>
<p>Hawa chews on this for a minute, and finally ventures a guess. “Are you…a thousand?”</p>
<p>Leonard shakes his head. “Try again.”</p>
<p>“Two thousand.”</p>
<p>He snorts. “Getting colder.”</p>
<p>Emboldened by the success of their advance guard, the other kids have started sidling up, sniffing around Leonard and his ship like curious dogs.</p>
<p>“This is a nice ship,” says a redheaded girl, the tallest of the bunch. She strokes an admiring hand down its shiny black hull. “Way fancier than the ones that usually stop here.”</p>
<p>“Yeah? What kind of ships are those?”</p>
<p>“Supply ships, mostly. Transports, sometimes. And one time – ” The girl cocks her head to the side, looks between Leonard and the ship with a spark of keen interest. “Say – are you <i>Starfleet</i>, Mr. Leonard?”</p>
<p>Leonard’s thrown, though he shouldn’t be. This girl’s, what – ten, eleven? Plenty old enough to remember the pandemic and the flood, the twin disasters that killed off half her neighbors, and the medship shuttles that arrived in their wake.</p>
<p>“No,” he says – truthfully, if not the whole truth. “I’m not with Starfleet. I’m just passing through.”</p>
<p>Redhead looks skeptical. “So what are you, then?”</p>
<p>“I’m a doctor.”</p>
<p>Hawa lights right up. “A doctor! My friend is a doctor, too.”</p>
<p>One of the boys scoffs. “Your friend is a <i>doll</i>.”</p>
<p>Hawa pulls a face at him. “Shut up, Marco. You don’t know anything.”</p>
<p>“Yeah, shut up, Marco,” says another boy, with a good twisting pinch to the offender’s neck. Hawa’s brother, Leonard guesses, or maybe he’s just sweet on her.</p>
<p>“<i>You</i> shut up,” Marco says indignantly, and punches the other boy in the shoulder.</p>
<p>Hawa ignores the scuffle breaking out in her honor to look hopefully at Leonard. “Do you want to come meet my friend? You could talk about doctor stuff.”</p>
<p>Leonard smiles at her again. It comes easier than it has in a long time. “Sure.”</p>
<p>Hawa slips her cold-fingered little hand into his and leads him off toward the distant group of buildings that make up the main settlement. The other kids come along too – even the roughhousing boys, who race after them with a pair of outraged yelps when they realize they’ve been left behind, still trading jabs and chasing each other haphazardly around the perimeter of the ragtag honor guard that’s assembled to escort Leonard into town.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>Just inside the village proper, they come upon a lanky white-bearded man sat on a stool, surrounded by a debris disk of tools and assorted items in varying states of disrepair: a snaggletoothed rake, a warp-bottomed cooking pot, a bucket with a broken handle. The man looks up from his work, takes them in at a glance and sighs theatrically, shaking his head. “What trouble are you kids bringing me now?”</p>
<p>“Mr. Mo, this is Mr. Leonard,” Hawa says officiously. “He’s a doctor. I’m taking him to meet my friend.”</p>
<p>The man raises his eyebrows at Leonard – not suspicious, but arch, like they’re sharing a joke over the kids’ heads. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Leonard,” he says, rising and offering a hand. “That your official title?”</p>
<p>Leonard shakes the man’s hand with the one not being clutched by Hawa. “Leonard McCoy. And I am a doctor – she’s got that part right.”</p>
<p>“Dr. Leonard McCoy,” the man says thoughtfully. “I’m Mohammad Asadi. Head councilor here. What brings you to Yaha?”</p>
<p>“Just passing through,” Leonard says, same as he told the kids – and then, because the man’s voice sounds kind of familiar and he’s probably after a more detailed explanation for why some stranger has turned up in his town, he adds, “I was here a few years ago. Back in ’62.”</p>
<p>Asadi’s eyes brighten with understanding. “<i>Ah.</i> I see.” He takes Leonard’s hand again, more warmly this time, clasping it between both of his. “Dr. McCoy. I knew I’d heard that name before. It’s a real pleasure to finally meet you in person.” He glances over Leonard’s shoulder. “You here by yourself?”</p>
<p>“Yep, just me,” Leonard says, hoping against hope that that’ll be the end of it.</p>
<p>No such luck. “How’s your captain?” Asadi asks with a smile. “Doing well, I hope? Full recovery, no relapses?”</p>
<p>“No,” Leonard says. “He, uh…he did recover, yeah. Pulled through just fine. No relapses.”</p>
<p>Something in his voice must give him away, or maybe Asadi’s little settlement has just experienced so much loss in the past few years that he can sniff it out now. His expression clouds, the light dimming from his eyes. “I see,” he says again, somberly this time. “I see.”</p>
<p>He looks around at the kids, who’ve been growing steadily more restless, listening with half an ear at most, bored by the grownup talk.</p>
<p>“You kids get on home and wash up. It’s almost dinnertime. If your folks come home from pasture and see you all grimy, they’ll send you out to sleep with the chattel where you belong.”</p>
<p>The kids erupt in laughter and protest, and Asadi makes a few big, dramatic shooing motions before turning his attention back to Leonard.</p>
<p>“Dinner’s in half an hour. We all eat together, right over there in the main hall.” He indicates a plain building nearby, a good deal larger than the rest. “I hope you’ll join us, Doctor. There are a lot of people who’d sure like to meet you.”</p>
<p>“Of course,” Leonard says. “It’d be my privilege.”</p>
<p>“But Mr. Mo,” Hawa says, tugging on Leonard’s hand, “Mr. Leonard said he’d come meet my friend. He <i>promised</i>.”</p>
<p>Asadi pats her head. “Then you’d better hurry up and introduce them before that dinner bell rings, don’t you think?”</p>
<p>Hawa beams and drags Leonard off.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>The house Hawa brings him to is small and tidy, all one room, sparsely furnished and scrupulously clean. There’s a big bed in one corner, a simple wooden table with a couple stools in another, some shelves on the wall holding household items and a few stacks of neatly folded clothes.</p>
<p>Hawa drops Leonard’s hand and runs over to the bed to pick up a wooden doll lying there, a cleverly crafted little thing with joints that let its arms and legs move freely. It’s dressed all in white, slightly lopsided pants and a shirt with clumsy hems – Hawa’s own handiwork, no doubt.</p>
<p>Hawa runs back to Leonard and thrusts the doll out toward him with a rattling of wooden limbs. “Dr. Mr. Leonard,” she says formally, “may I please introduce my friend, Dr. Bones.”</p>
<p>In an instant, all the air goes out of the room.</p>
<p></p><div>
  <p>
    <i>“There are kids in that town, Bones. Half of them are already sick, and with the flood – ”</i>
  </p>
  <p><i>“Dammit, Jim, you think I don’t know that? What they need is strategic support to organize relief efforts on the ground. This ain’t the time for your lone cowboy shit. And what about the rest of the colony, huh? Those people need you </i>here<i>, sorting this nightmare out from the top. Your </i>crew<i> need you here. Getting yourself killed trying to play hero isn’t going to help anyone.”</i></p>
  <p>
  <i>“I’m going. End of discussion.”</i>
</p>
</div><p>Hawa is watching Leonard expectantly, waiting for his response. He forces a smile onto his face – a damn sight harder than the last one – and gives a jerky nod to the doll in the girl’s hands. “Nice to meet you, Doctor.”</p>
<p>Hawa holds the doll up to her ear. “He says it’s nice to meet you too.”</p>
<p>Leonard swallows hard, tries to think how best to come at this. “Where’d you, uh, meet your friend?”</p>
<p>“My papa gave him to me,” Hawa says. She strokes the doll’s smooth, varnished head. “Jim’s the one who told me his name, though. I guess Papa told him, before the river took him away.”</p>
<p>
  <i>Fuck.</i>
</p>
<p>Leonard closes his eyes, just briefly, one long second to gather himself before he can push on ahead. “Jim, huh? He another friend of yours?”</p>
<p>Hawa nods eagerly. “Yeah, but he’s not a doctor. He’s a <i>Starfleet captain</i>.” She says it proudly, like a kid bragging on their cool parent. “He’s got a big, humongous ship – way bigger than yours – and he takes it all over the whole entire universe so he and his friends can help people. Like how he helped me and Mama.”</p>
<p>Leonard should have been prepared for this. How could he not have seen this coming? “Yeah? How’d he do that?”</p>
<p>Hawa grows serious. “It was back at the old place. I was still little then. Me and Mama were really sick, all the neighbors too, and Miss Constanza couldn’t make it better. And it was raining and raining and raining and it wouldn’t stop, and nobody could get out to go get help from the city, and then the river came and took lots of people away. Papa tried to help, but the river took him too.” Her mouth quivers, and she looks down, hugging the doll to her chest. She’s quiet for a minute, but when she starts talking again, her voice is clear and strong. “Then Jim came and got us all out of the old place, and we came here instead. The river never comes this far, not even when it rains for days and days. But Dr. Bones got left behind, so Jim went and got him for me.”</p>
<p>Of course he did. What could be more quintessentially <i>Jim</i> than wading back into a killer flood to fetch a sick, fatherless little girl her dolly? Leonard would bet anything that’s when he ripped his damn suit.</p>
<p>“Dr. Bones isn't a very good swimmer, though, so he had to ride on Jim’s shoulders and hang onto his helmet.” Hawa swings the doll up onto her own thin shoulders to demonstrate. “He was all wet when they got here, but Jim said he was real tough, just like me, and he’d be all right. And he told me about how he’s a doctor and his name is Bones, because he fixes people’s bones and stuff.” She brings the doll back down and hugs it again, squeezing it tight. “Jim said I have to make sure to always keep Dr. Bones with me, and hold him really tight when I’m scared or I miss Papa, and he’ll make it better and everything will be okay.”</p>
<p>Jesus fucking Christ.</p>
<p>Leonard can’t speak, can’t say another word, the grief in his chest swelling up to stopper his throat. God, isn’t this supposed to get <i>easier</i>? It’s been so long; surely at some point the pain has to start dulling, gentling into something more manageable, but it’s only grown bigger and heavier and harder to bear. How is it possible that he can miss Jim more every day he’s gone – that he can love him more with every passing second, the universe in his heart still expanding out and out and out when everything else inside him is caged in stone?</p>
<p>“And it’s true, Mr. Leonard,” Hawa is saying. “Dr. Bones keeps me safe, just like Jim said. Marco says I’m making it up, but I’m <i>not</i>. He’s just mad he doesn’t have a friend like Dr. Bones.” She scrunches up her face and whispers conspiratorially, “Nobody wants to be <i>his</i> friend because he’s an impertinent snoutband.”</p>
<p>Leonard smiles at her, weakly. His hurt-clogged throat opens up a bit, enough to let him say: “Jim teach you that one?”</p>
<p>“Yeah!” Hawa chirps, surprised and pleased. “How’d you know?”</p>
<p>He reaches out with one trembling hand and pats the top of her head, like Asadi did earlier – like Jim did too, probably, all those years ago. “I had a hunch.”</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>Deep into the dark frigid quiet of night, long after taking his leave from Hawa and Asadi and all the rest, Leonard sits on the steps of his ship and looks out at the dead black fields, gray now in the thin light of a waning moon. Beyond them lies the village of Yaha: nothing much to look at, just a humble main hall and a couple dozen small, sturdy houses, and inside those houses forty-seven villagers lying fast asleep. They’re widows and widowers, orphaned and childless, every one of them touched by unimaginable loss – and yet here they are, rebuilding together, as close-knit as any family. Holding each other tight.</p>
<p>All because a stranger in a white suit came to them one hopeless night three years ago, in their very darkest hour, and brought them here, to a place where the river will never come, not even if it rains for days and days.</p>
<p>Leonard thinks about that as he sits alone in the cold with only his memories and the hum of the ship at his back to keep him company – all those lives saved, all those teary-eyed people shaking his hand in the main hall – and he thinks too about how <i>angry</i> he was when Jim got beamed onto the Carter, already sick, feverish and sweating inside his torn, useless suit. </p>
<p>Oh, he was a mean old bastard those next few days. Normally he took it easy on the kid when he was in such a bad way, reserved the worst of his ire for after they were out of the woods, but he was so furious and exhausted and scared that it all came spilling out around the edges, made all the worse by the fact that Jim was too busy dying to spare the energy to sass him back.</p>
<p>Even now, staring across the fields at a town that wouldn’t exist if Jim hadn’t done what he did, Leonard still can’t quite forgive him for that endless week in the Carter’s isolation unit – that long fluorescent blur of day and night, fighting tooth and nail against a disease the virologists were only just starting to understand.</p>
<p>He makes himself think about Hawa and her mother, that gang of grubby kids, the friendly din of conversation and laughter and clanking flatware around long crowded dinner tables, but in the next breath he’s thinking about Jim’s fiery red eyes, stained by who even knew how many broken blood vessels. He’s thinking of how suffocating his hazmat suit felt, how irrationally he wanted to rip it off and treat Jim with his bare hands instead of fumbling through cumbersome gloves. He’s thinking of the nasty way he laid into Jim at one point, demanding to know why he couldn’t at least <i>try</i> to keep some of his bodily fluids <i>inside</i> his body where they belonged, and how Jim couldn’t answer, could only blink those dazed red eyes at him before coughing up another hot mouthful of black-speckled blood onto the sleeve of his suit.</p>
<p></p><div>
  <p><i>“You’re just goddamn contrary, that’s your problem,” Leonard growls, blindly jabbing a hypo against Jim’s neck with his eyes glued to the biofunction monitor, barreling forward in word and action, because if he slows down for a nanosecond, if he gives in even one fucking centimeter to the terror clawing at his heels, it’s going to eat him alive and he won’t be able to save Jim. “God forbid you do as you’re told just once in your life, just </i>once<i>, instead of – ”</i></p>
  <p>
  <i>There’s a touch at his arm, glancing and clumsy, and he looks down to find Jim pawing at him, blood-slick fingers unable to find purchase on the shiny white material of the suit.</i>
</p>
  <p>
    <i>Shit. “What is it?” he asks urgently. He scans Jim’s face for the usual signs of distress – the swollen lips of anaphylaxis, the blue tint of hypovolemic shock – before letting his gaze dart back to the monitor to check BP and sats.</i>
  </p>
  <p>
  <i>Jim shakes his head, still trying to grab at him. He doesn’t seem to be coding, so Leonard humors him, lets his arm drop closer so Jim can reach him easier, and Jim wraps his fingers around Leonard’s wrist, bunching up the sleeve.</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“Bones,” he croaks, so low and strained that Leonard can barely make it out through his helmet over the noise of the negative pressure vents and the beeping monitors and the transfusion line and the humming biobed, a discordant symphony of sound from all the machines working as desperately as he is to keep Jim alive for another hour.</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>Leonard curls his free hand over Jim’s, feeling the slippery heat of infected blood even through the thick membrane of his glove. “Yeah, Jim.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
    <i>Jim’s red-smeared mouth ticks up a little on one side, and he looks so much like himself all of a sudden that Leonard half expects him to crack a joke, complain about the scarcity of pillows or some other egregious failure of medbay hospitality as he has so many times before.  He squeezes Leonard’s wrist, his grip weak but tenacious, clinging. “You got this.”</i>
  </p>
  <p><i>Leonard looks down at him, at this absolute disaster of a medical emergency under his care, a CTD if ever there was one, bleeding from every damn orifice he has, flirting with multiple organ failure, and </i>smiling<i> at him, trying to convince him it’ll all be okay – and he knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that he’d break his oath a hundred times over for Jim Kirk, if that’s what it took. He’d break every law of man and God and the universe itself, just to keep this ungovernable maniac with him for one more day.</i></p>
  <p>
  <i>“Well, obviously,” he says, and rubs his thumb over Jim’s bloody knuckles, and then he gently shakes off Jim’s hand and gets back to work.</i>
</p>
</div><p>Jim survived in the end, and thanks to him, so did forty-seven men, women, and children who now lie safe and sound in their beds. Those kids will reach adulthood because of him, will get married and raise their own kids, will grow old and gray and liver-spotted even though Jim himself never will.</p>
<p>Here they are, Leonard thinks, gazing across the barren fields to the sleeping village beyond – Jim’s survivors, living on long after the man who saved them has gone.</p>
<p>Here they all <a href="https://youtu.be/ATX4wKhxqO8">are</a>.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>He must have fallen asleep at some point, because the next thing he knows, he’s opening his eyes to the gray light of pre-dawn.</p>
<p>His clothes are damp with dew, clammy against his skin. He’s slumped awkwardly against the stair railing, and his head’s tilted to one side at an angle that promises vicious neck and shoulder pain in the hours to come.</p>
<p>Perfect. Just the way he likes to start his day.</p>
<p>Foul mood notwithstanding, he told Asadi he’d come by this morning, have breakfast with everyone and say goodbye before taking off. He’d better go and get it over with. He just hopes Hawa leaves that damn doll at home.</p>
<p>He pushes up to his feet with a groan. It’s the very same groan his daddy used to make getting out of his armchair, and Leonard spares a moment’s thought as he’s creaking upright to wonder just when exactly he got so goddamn old. He’s not even forty yet, but some days he’d swear he really is a thousand, like Hawa guessed yesterday. Out of the mouths of babes, and all that.</p>
<p>It’s probably just the cold, he consoles himself – that and the horrendous position he fell asleep in. Never mind the fact that he hauls himself up off his rock-mattressed bunk most mornings with something of the same leaden ache to him. No, it’s definitely the weather that’s to blame.</p>
<p>He stretches his cold-numbed arms over his head, sets about shaking off the stiffness and getting his blood moving again, only to be arrested by a faint tugging sensation at his ankle. He frowns – did his pants get caught on something? – and looks down to see...</p>
<p>Green.</p>
<p>A thin tendril of green is twined delicately around his pant leg, a scattering of slender white flowers popping out here and there along its path.</p>
<p>Leonard knows it on sight, would recognize it anywhere. He’s a Georgia boy, after all, one who spent any number of long sticky-hot summers running around his grandparents’ backyard, poking his nose into the tangles of sweet-smelling flowers his granny complained were nothing but gussied-up weeds.</p>
<p>He knows <i>what</i> he’s looking at, but where he’s stuck is on <i>how</i> – how it is that here, of all places, growing up out of the hard black earth of a field half a galaxy away from Georgia, there could possibly be a single lonesome honeysuckle vine curling its fragile, tenacious grip around his ankle.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p><a href="https://fireinmywoods.tumblr.com/post/644307737543688192/rumi-ode-1937-unmarked-boxes">Hmm</a>... </p>
<p>♥</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. Chapter 7</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I want to take a moment to thank all the readers who are sticking this out with me through the incomplete phase. I meant it when I said it was totally fine if folks wanted to wait for the fic to be fully posted, and I will be immensely thankful for those readers as well once they make it to this point, in part because it means a lot to know that the things I write don't just vanish into oblivion after the week they get posted. (Hi, future readers! I love you!)</p>
<p>That said, I am so grateful to those of you who are taking this first plunge with me. Your reactions and feedback and musings are invaluable to me after so long spent working alone on this fic, and even more than that, your responses are in some ways woven into the story itself as I continue to polish up each chapter for posting. Thank you. ♥</p>
<p>Warning for anxiety and some themes that might strike a chord with those who've been stuck at home during the pandemic, as well as reference to character death.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Most of the time, Leonard doesn’t mind his ship too much. It could certainly do with a few more creature comforts, but it’s not so bad as starships go. The controls are simple enough, streamlined and intuitive, and he appreciates that the AI handles most of the day-to-day piloting and navigation on its own. And the ship itself is still humming along in fine running order with minimal maintenance on his end, which is a relief – he'd be up shit creek if it cracked a conduit or presented him with some other complex engineering emergency he wouldn’t stand a chance in hell at repairing on his own.</p>
<p>Idiot-proofed, indeed. Scotty and Spock really knew what they were doing when they picked this sleek little thing out for him.</p>
<p>Lately, though, it seems like all the time he’s been spending cooped up alone on this tiny tin can is finally starting to take its toll. He’s not a restless man by nature, but since leaving Jhonta he finds that he can’t stay still. He’s squirrelly with nerves, fidgeting with anything he can get his hands on, jogging his leg whenever he’s sat down, and when he can’t stand the itch any longer he gets up and paces, roaming the cramped layout of his ship in an endless back-and-forth until he damn near wears a hole through the floor. He feels stiff and achy all over, his muscles knotted up with the contradictory tension of underuse.</p>
<p>It’d be one thing if he could brush it off as cabin fever, but there’s more to it than that and he knows it. While he’s no stranger to anxiety, this feels different from anything he's dealt with before, harder to either ignore or battle into submission. He can’t quite put into words what it is that’s got him so wound up all of a sudden. He’s got this feeling, is all, this hazy undefined feeling like he’s always just missing something – like there’s some gigantic <i>thing</i> lurking right outside his field of vision, vanishing every time he tries to catch it. He doesn’t even have a sense of whether it’s good or bad, just that it’s there, and it’s driving him out of his mind.</p>
<p>He tries to approach the problem like a clinician. If a patient came to him and said they were dealing with these symptoms, what would he tell them? He’s not crazy; the human stress response kept their species alive for hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s not his modern brain’s fault that it doesn’t understand the difference between a shitty day and a hungry lion about to pounce; it’s not all in his head, but it may be at least somewhat under his control.</p>
<p>He doesn’t want to start messing around with medication, not out here alone without anyone to consult with or to keep an eye on him while he’s figuring out the right fit and dosage, and he doesn’t have much in the way of pharmaceuticals on hand in any case. If he gets desperate he’ll park himself at some starbase or medically advanced Federation planet for a while until he gets his neurochemistry sorted out, but to start with he experiments with other treatments.</p>
<p>He cuts back on caffeine, limiting himself to a single cup of mediocre replicated coffee. (No great loss there.) He dedicates time to stretching out his tense muscles. He turns the sonic to a more therapeutic frequency. He changes up his diet, drinks more water and less whiskey, invents routines to give his idle bled-together days some structure.</p>
<p>He starts making use of the ship’s virtual trainer function, despite the fact that the Terran profile was clearly designed by someone working off a second- or thirdhand understanding of human cardiovascular endurance. Maybe it's just wounded pride speaking, but he doesn’t care to believe he’s really so pathetically out of shape that he should be ready to drop by the end of a standard training session, breathless and hopelessly overexerted, his limbs feeling like they’re filled with cement.</p>
<p>A workout that intense should at least help leech out some of his restive energy, but it doesn’t. <i>None</i> of it is helping. He stretches and self-massages and eats mountains of vegetables, exercises to the point of physical exhaustion like a toddler that needs tiring out before bedtime, and still he can’t seem to settle into his own skin.</p>
<p>He even reluctantly gives meditation a go, only to find that the hideous unsettled sensation he’s trying to escape somehow gets <i>worse</i> the quieter his mind is. It rises up inside him like a whirling maelstrom, grasping at him, eager to drag him down into its fathomless depths. Ignoring it isn’t an option – accepting and moving past it, even less so. It takes just a few attempts for Leonard to decide conclusively that meditation is simply not for him. Other people may find it helpful to confront their feelings head-on that way, but for his part, cracking open that door to peek inside does nothing but let his anxiety get a foot in.</p>
<p>Figures. It’s his own fault for thinking that something so highly extolled by Vulcans might actually be worth a damn for dealing with human emotions.</p>
<p>He does keep up with the rest of his efforts, even though none of it is making a lick of difference yet. Lifestyle adjustments like these can show cumulative effects, he knows, and so he continues drinking water, following his self-imposed routines, stretching and exercising and taking long sonic showers while wishing for the luxury of hot water, all in a futile attempt to persuade the anxiety to loosen its locked-jaw grip on his throat.</p>
<p>It’s worst at night. He lies awake in his bunk for hours, unable to relax enough to even shut his eyes. The peaceful hum of the ship sounds intolerably loud to him now, and the familiar whirring of its routine systems is enough to set his teeth on edge, magnified to a shrill wail by his hypersensitive ears and fretful mind. He can’t find a remotely comfortable resting position on his hard bunk, and of course that just grows worse the longer he tosses and turns until all he can focus on is the persistent strain in his back that defies all his attempts to contort himself into a more supportive position, the awkward angle of his neck no matter how he tries to arrange himself on his pillow. He’s tense and stiff and exhausted and cold and miserable and he can’t get his agitated brain to <i>shut the goddamn hell up</i> for even a minute. His thoughts spin fitfully from one source of stress to another, gnawing at his hurts and his regrets and his most nightmarish what-ifs in turn, and any time he starts to drift his mind will suddenly lurch back online with a panicky jolt that yanks him back from the edge, coursing adrenaline through him and leaving him even more alert than before, jittery with some bone-deep, primal unease about the unknown lurking out there in the dark.</p>
<p>There’s an uncertainty to sleep now, a <i>potential</i> – but potential for what, exactly? He can’t explain it, though he knows as the thought crosses his mind that he’s lying to himself. Deep down, he knows perfectly well what this is about; he just doesn’t want to give voice to it. He might not be able to define the exact dimensions of his anxiety, but he'd have to be the dumbest halfwit to ever fall off the back of a turnip truck not to recognize that it all started the night he knelt on the floor with Jim’s recorder in his hands and imagined he could feel its impossible warmth against his skin.</p>
<p>He was just sleepwalking, he insists to himself for the hundredth time, but that excuse feels less convincing every time he reaches for it. And, look, even if he accepts that he got confused about the recorder, conjured up things that weren’t real – even so, there’s still the honeysuckle vine to contend with. The vine was there, dammit. That was no trick of a dream-addled mind. He knows it wasn’t, because he still has the damn thing, ripped it right up out of the lifeless earth and brought it with him. It was real, it <i>is</i> real, there’s no denying it.</p>
<p>That’s why he brought it along, he tells himself – as evidence, as hard data – only that’s a lie too. The truth is he just couldn’t bear to leave it behind, not when it so obviously wanted to be with him.</p>
<p>Jesus, what the hell’s the matter with him? It’s a <i>plant</i>; it doesn’t have wants or feelings or anything else. He’s losing his mind, he really is.</p>
<p></p><div>
  <p>
  <i>“Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain,” Jim intones, leaning down to get a closer look at the stone on the laboratory counter. He glances over his shoulder and adds, with that grating touch of condescension he tends toward whenever he feels he’s dispensing a real pearl of wisdom: “Old English proverb.”</i>
</p>
  <p><i>“Uh huh,” Leonard says flatly. “Got anything on what to do with something that’s got a brain but doesn’t </i>use<i> it?”</i></p>
  <p>
  <i>Jim’s grave expression screws up with childish indignation – far more true to form, in Leonard’s opinion. “How is this my fault? I’m not even the one who brought it onboard.”</i>
</p>
  <p><i>“No, but you are the one who keeps poking at it like a two year – dammit, Jim, would you </i>stop<i> that? Damn thing’s going to bite your finger off or something.”</i></p>
  <p>
  <i>Jim has the gall to roll his eyes at him. “It’s a rock, Bones. It doesn’t have teeth.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“Yeah, and five minutes ago we thought it didn’t have a voice, until it started spouting riddles at us like a goddamn sphinx.”</i>
</p>
  <p><i>“Good point,” Jim says, turning back to study the stone again. In spite of his own warning, there’s a decidedly gleeful quality in his voice as he says, “Isn’t it </i>awesome<i>?”</i></p>
</div><p>A plant doesn’t have a brain, hidden or otherwise. It’s not trying to do anything or communicate some mysterious intent. It’s just a plant, the same way a recorder is just a recorder and a picture’s just a picture.</p>
<p>The fact is Leonard’s been rattled ever since he left Yorktown, and it’s only gotten worse since then. Being back in Jim’s suite, the incident with the recorder, everything that happened on Jhonta – it’s all thrown him off balance, left him imagining patterns where they don’t exist, fruitlessly seeking order and intent from a fundamentally chaotic universe.</p>
<p>Things are what they are: a vine, a doll, a threadbare old shirt. They don’t mean anything more, no matter how desperately he might want them to.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>He gets it into his head to listen to the recording from Xulos, if for no other reason than to ground himself in cold, heartless reality. Jim is dead. Jim is <i>gone</i>, somewhere there’s no coming back from, and it’s high time Leonard learned to live with that.</p>
<p>That’s the idea, anyway, but it falls apart when he asks the AI to play the file and gets a cordial error message in response: <i>“I’m sorry, I can’t find that file. Would you like to play something else?”</i></p>
<p>Initially Leonard assumes he just misplaced it, forgot which sub-drive he saved it to, but a little digging reveals that the AI is right: the file is nowhere to be found. How the fuck could that have happened? He knows he uploaded it onto the ship’s computer when he first came onboard, he <i>knows</i> he did, but it’s vanished without a trace, disappeared from the system like it was never there at all.</p>
<p><i>It’s okay,</i> he tells himself as he digs out the recorder from the desk drawer where he’s kept it since the sleepwalking incident. The file is still on the recorder. He can reupload it, maybe save it to his personal drive for an extra backup, just to be on the safe side.</p>
<p>He sets the recorder on the charging station and stares at it like the proverbial watched pot, counting the seconds until it builds up enough power to be turned on. <i>It’s okay,</i> he repeats to himself. <i>It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay…</i></p>
<p>The little yellow light appears, and Leonard snatches the recorder from the pad, though he knows he should give it at least another minute to charge up past the bare minimum. He can’t wait, too impatient to ease the worry that’s taken root in his gut. <i>It's okay, it's okay, it's okay.</i> He just needs to listen to the recording, soothe away his little spike of irrational alarm, and then everything will be okay.</p>
<p>Jim's final log is the only saved file, it'll play automatically, so Leonard presses the play button, eager like he's never been before to hear the slow drip of rain against wet leaves, Jim’s inhale as he brings the recorder to his mouth to speak -</p>
<p>He jumps out of his fucking skin when a <i>shriek</i> erupts from the speaker, a high-pitched screech of shapeless noise that shoots instant terror into his heart like a vial of adrenaline.</p>
<p>He drops the recorder instinctively – grabs for it with his other hand just as instinctively, fumbling it in against his belly as shock mingles with a new fear of breaking the damn thing before he can back up the file.</p>
<p>The file, which isn’t playing.</p>
<p>The shrieking lasted only a second, but the speaker is emitting a different kind of unhappy sound now, halting and juddery. Leonard stops the recorder, restarts it while bracing himself for another piercing screech of protest, and this time the speaker just crackles at him, hisses and spits like an angry cat as he tries again and again to cajole the device into cooperating.</p>
<p>It’s the file, he realizes numbly, jabbing uselessly at the buttons in an effort to resist the truth he can feel settling cold into his bones. The file has been corrupted. The recording, Jim’s recording – it’s <i>gone</i>. </p>
<p>And just like that, his messy tangle of nerves and vague unease gives way all at once to good old-fashioned panic.</p>
<p>He needs this recording. He hates it, resents it, wishes he could scrub the memory of it from his brain and never again hear it howling through his dreams, and he <i>needs</i> it, because it’s Jim, the very end of him, the snuffing out of his wild extraordinary flame. It’s Jim’s last moments, his last words. It’s Jim calling out for him in that small bewildered voice, scared and all alone, asking him to make it better.</p>
<p>It can’t be gone. He’s already lost so much: the warmth of Jim’s body wrapped around him at night, the taste of his skin, the gleaming promise of his smile. He can’t lose this too, he can’t, he <i>can’t</i> –</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>In the end, he’s only able to salvage a few tiny remnants from the recorder. When he manages to persuade the computer to open what he’s scraped together, the display shows a length of just twenty-four seconds, a minuscule fraction of the original. Huge chunks of the recording are lost – not just beyond repair, but missing entirely, whole minutes and hours stripped away as if they never were. The few surviving fragments of audio are scrambled and patchy, jumbled up, crashing into each other.</p>
<p><i>“Bones,”</i> Jim’s voice says a second in, strained but wry, optimistic, and then the file skips, crackles, and he’s bleeding out, <i>“wrong, something’s…”</i></p>
<p>A few disjointed consonants, incomprehensible, threaded together with static and the wailing wind.</p>
<p><i>“Please,”</i> Jim moans. The file trips over itself, loops back to repeat, <i>“please, please, please,”</i> until finally Leonard nudges the slider forward a second, the stuttering echo of Jim’s fear pounding in his chest like a second heartbeat.</p>
<p>More garbled sounds, fizzing with static. And then, low and distorted, like something heard from deep underwater:</p>
<p>
  <i>“Bones?”</i>
</p>
<p>A loud squeal of feedback, and the audio cuts out.</p>
<p>That’s it. That’s the end of the file – all that’s left of it.</p>
<p>Leonard stares at the screen. Twenty-four seconds, the audio player says. A pathetic fraction of the original, and yet it’s more, somehow. So much more.</p>
<p>Things are what they are. And sometimes what they are is a goddamn <i>message</i>.</p>
<p>He lurches to his feet and stumbles around the ship, hunting out the items he’s stashed in various hiding places – the Yorktown box shoved to the back of the closet, the dead honeysuckle vine tucked away out of sight at the bottom of a drawer – and then he clears off his desk and lays everything out together, all the little things he's collected since that day on Xulos:</p>
<p>The recorder.<br/>
The matching seashell pieces from Piaj.<br/>
The salve.<br/>
The chess piece.<br/>
The shirt.<br/>
The Starfleet PADD, turned on and displaying the picture from Jim’s party.<br/>
The withered brown length of vine.</p>
<p>He looks down at it all when he’s done, at this haphazard assortment of junk from across half a dozen systems, and thinks that it’s not so very different from the last set of clues Jim left for him to follow: a bootprint, a discarded hypo, a trail of <a href="https://youtu.be/p_I7x3ZrF2c">blood</a>.</p>
<p>Jim’s voice is still reverberating in his chest, a ripple of seismic energy trembling through the whole of that heavy, rock-solid hurt. <i>Please, please,</i> it says. <i>Please, please.</i></p>
<p>Leonard is a skeptic, through and through. That hasn’t changed. He’s never believed in ghosts or spirits or mediums or any of that fanciful horseshit, and he’s not about to start now.</p>
<p>But Jim?</p>
<p>He touches the PADD screen, gently rests a fingertip against Jim’s blurry hand where it hovers over his own heart.</p>
<p>Jim, he believes in. That hasn’t changed either.</p>
<p>“All right, kid,” he says aloud – yielding, as he always has, to the unstoppable force of Jim’s will. “I’m listening.”</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>And so he waits.</p>
<p>Jim always loved giving him grief about being set in his ways. Leonard preferred to think of himself as committed, <i>decisive</i>, but Jim would scoff and say he could dress it up however he liked – at the end of the day he was a stubborn old son of a bitch, plain and simple.</p>
<p></p><div>
  <p><i>“That is goddamn rich coming from you.” Leonard glares daggers at the barred door in front of him, since he can’t exactly get Jim in his sights at the moment. “</i>I’m<i> stubborn? Which one of us was it who decided we absolutely had to infiltrate the bloodsport ring ourselves instead of just handing over the bastards we caught and letting the investigators do their jobs?”</i></p>
  <p>
  <i>“Affirming a disjunct,” Jim says, tutting with disapproval. He wriggles his hand higher up between their backs, scrabbling uselessly just below where the padlock to their chains is digging into Leonard’s spine. “Resorting to fallacies already, Bones? I expect better from you.”</i>
</p>
  <p><i>“Oh, save it for Spock, would you? I’m not in the mood for one of your logical pissing contests.” Leonard tenses as he feels Jim’s arm twist at an alarming angle between them, the movement accompanied by a grunt of discomfort he doesn’t much like the sound of. “For God’s sake, you idiot, be </i>careful<i>. If you pop that elbow out of joint again, I’ll feed you to the damn razorbacks myself.”</i></p>
</div><p>Hypocrisy aside, Leonard has to admit that Jim had him pretty well pegged, in this as in most everything else. He’s slow to change his mind on just about anything, always has been, deeply resistant to the slightest shift in his paradigm. Jocelyn used to say arguing with him was like beating her head against a brick wall, only there was an outside chance the wall might eventually crack.</p>
<p>But Jim was a persistent bastard, and in time he discovered that if he just kept at it long enough, if he kept battering away at that brick wall from different angles, he’d eventually find the right combination of factors to let him break through. Leonard’s lost count of all the slow-burning arguments he wound up conceding to Jim over the years: the question of continuing to room together after their first year at the Academy, the appeal of caramel corn dipped in hot sauce, whether or not Leonard should take the flight control exams to qualify for a senior starship position, how many days Jim needed to stay in medbay after a major surgery, the damn bed-making debate. And just to really twist the knife, Leonard usually ended up so firmly on Jim’s side of things that he’d actually be <i>glad</i> the idiot had badgered him into changing his mind. For as much as he might fuss and protest along the way, once the balance tipped and he’d been swayed over to Jim’s position, that was the end of it – he was all in, no turning back.</p>
<p>Jim knew that better than anyone. It seems he hasn’t forgotten.</p>
<p>Leonard put up a good fight this time, but that’s all over and done with now. The balance has been tipped, and Jim got his way, as usual.</p>
<p>Leonard really shouldn’t be the least bit surprised. If just one lone soul in all of space and time were able to defy the laws of nature and fight their way back across that great divide for the sole purpose of getting in the last word, it figures it’d be Jim Kirk.</p>
<p>Stubborn, his ass. Talk about the singularity calling the kettle black.</p>
<p>The point is, he’s sure of this now, whatever it is. He may not understand it yet, may not have it mapped out and analyzed, but he trusts in it. Trusts in Jim.</p>
<p>The ball’s in Jim’s court now, he’s pretty sure, so he bides his time, content to wait for Jim’s next move – content to be waiting for anything at all, after months of dreading the barren gray nothingness of the innumerable days ahead – and in the meantime he finally rests easy, relaxing into his new understanding that there’s nothing the least bit <i>unknown</i> about what’s lurking out there in the dark. If Jim wants to knock some more shit off his desk or grow a damn rainforest in the ship overnight, he can have at it. Whatever helps him say what he’s trying to say.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>He waits, and while he waits he looks again and again at Jim’s clues, his little messages. Now that he understands what they are, there’s a certain comfort in studying them, puzzling over the precise meaning of each one.</p>
<p>Of course, he doesn’t know how far Jim’s control actually goes, how targeted his efforts have been. Some of these things probably did find their way into Leonard's hands through pure chance, like he originally assumed: it's not exactly an earth-shattering miracle to find seashells on a beach, after all, and he has no idea which of the items from Yorktown Jim actually left behind in his quarters when they left and which might have mysteriously snuck into Paris's box after the fact. And whatever Jim is now, there’s no guarantee that he thinks and plans the way he used to. Even if they were all from him, he could have just been reacting to the places they’ve passed through, sifting back through his memories and offering the first fragments that got dredged up: seashells on Piaj, that raggedy old shirt on the station where he wore it out, a literal snapshot of a treasured moment when he felt happy and at peace.</p>
<p>It might be wishful thinking, but Leonard feels like it’s got to be more deliberate than that. There have been too many coincidences which go beyond the items themselves. What are the odds that he’d happen to check just that one drawer at the cottage on Piaj - that out of all the hundreds of suites in Yorktown’s officers’ tower, he’d end up back in Jim’s - that he’d glance over the nav display at just the right time to notice he'd be passing within easy traveling range of Jhonta?

</p>
<p>Leonard can’t say he’s ever been haunted before, but he’s been around the block enough times to recognize when Jim's up to something. <i>How</i> he’s managed any of this Leonard will likely never know, but then that’s about the normal way of things. Jim has always been impossible in every sense of the world, and, as ever, Leonard is just along for the ride.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>He waits, and all the while Jim’s voice goes on rattling around inside his chest, <i>please, please</i>, softer than it was, quiet aftershocks of the quake that took his feet out from under him. <i>Please, please</i>, it <a href="https://youtu.be/zAKO1QvPLyw">says</a>, and his heart beats in time, hammering ever stronger against the confines of its cage.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>He waits, and one day slips into another, the ship’s chronometer marking the arbitrary passage of time – meaningless out here in the black, with no axis to turn on and no sun to orbit. The AI tells him it’s 0200 hours, but it could just as easily be whatever time it is back in San Francisco, or on the last planet he passed, on Jhonta or Piaj or Xulos or Andamar VI.</p>
<p>Jim used to go off about that sometimes when he was drunk – about the subjectivity of time and man’s hubris in claiming to have defined it, how irrational it all was, how absurd, and how it didn’t mean anything anyway because of special relativity and gravitational time dilation and something about beads on a string, some tortured metaphor from one of his old books. Damned if Leonard can remember all the details; he’d learned to tune out of Jim’s shitfaced ramblings after a certain point for the sake of his own sanity. <i>Time is bullshit</i>, was the general thrust of it, and Leonard can’t say now that he entirely disagrees.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>He waits, and time passes, and maybe on Earth and on Andamar VI it passes differently, but that doesn’t really matter. All that matters is the tremor of Jim’s voice in his chest; Jim’s arm around him on a spotless white couch on Yorktown; the memory of Jim’s recorder warm in his hands.</p>
<p>His stubborn, contrary Jim, clinging onto him like a honeysuckle vine.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>He waits and he waits – and then one day while he’s sipping his coffee he hears a quiet beeping from the nav console, the polite voice of the AI asking him to confirm the coordinates blinking on the display.</p>
<p>He doesn’t recognize them. The strings of numbers mean nothing to him. It could be anywhere in the universe, for all he knows: Qo’noS, Delta Vega, a nameless rock in some unexplored galaxy where Starfleet ships have never ventured.</p>
<p>“Coordinates confirmed,” he says, and sets a course at warp two for wherever it is his ship is about to take him.</p>
<p>Jim wants to go there. That’s good enough for him.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>♥</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0008"><h2>8. Chapter 8</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Hey, y'all. No long-winded rambling this week - just a reminder of my immense gratitude for each and every one of you, and my hope that you are hanging in there and finding things to look forward to in the months to come.</p><p>And, for the first time: no warnings this chapter. (Okay, one teeny-tiny mention of vomit, but that's <i>it</i>.)</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Well, it’s not Qo’noS, at least.</p><p>Nothing on Xenafi’i is even slightly familiar to Leonard: not the snow-capped mountains ringing the capital, not the bustling city itself with its ancient walls and white cobblestone streets, not the humming swarms of personal transport pods with their blatant disregard for pedestrian life, and certainly not the bright, teeming, noisy bazaar Jim’s coordinates have led him to.</p><p>He runs the name over in his head a few times as he makes his way through the crowd, trying to jog his memory. <i>Xenafi’i.</i> It does ring a vague sort of bell, which makes him think the Enterprise must have come here at some point, but he can’t quite remember the story behind it.</p><p>With any luck there’s another of Jim’s little gifts hidden around here somewhere, which might give him a clue about what Jim wants or otherwise enlighten him as to why he’s here. In the meantime, unsure of where to start looking, he wanders aimlessly, squeezing through masses of package-laden shoppers and trying to resist the urge to scowl at every careless idiot who shoulder-checks him or steps on his foot. He’s never done too well in crowds like this, especially without Jim to act as a buffer.</p><p>It could be that Jim just wants to be around people again. He loved the chaos of markets like this one – the more aggressive unpredictable strangers, the better. He thrived on the hectic energy, somehow growing brighter and bolder and more animated in the tumultuous heart of the same mob scenes that only ever made Leonard feel small and tired. He liked the <i>muchness</i> of those places, he said: all those people going about their lives, each one the hero of their own story, the tiniest of blips on each other’s radars as their paths intersected for a single second before diverging again, maybe never to cross again.</p><p>Leonard thought that was kind of sad, if anything, but Jim found his own form of joy in it. Maybe it was the undefined potential of it all that appealed to him, or maybe he simply enjoyed letting his own overactive imagination run wild. He used to amuse himself sometimes by picking faces out of the crowd at random and spinning up lively backstories for them, assigning them dramatic pasts and romantic entanglements that wouldn’t have been out of place on a Tryptarian soap opera.</p><p>
  <i>That guy’s got a million kids at home. You see the look on his face? That’s the look of a man who hasn’t slept in like fifteen years, trying to convince himself not to take the grocery credits and book a ticket on the next ship going anywhere but here.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>Those three are all madly in love with each other, but none of them have figured it out yet.</i>
</p><p><i>Con woman. A really good one. She’s been proposed to by three different heads of state – </i>after<i> she’d already robbed them.</i></p><p>
  <i>Gambling addiction. He’s going to win big tonight, but he won’t know when to stop, so he’ll lose it all and end up in the hole.</i>
</p><p>There was never a dull moment with Jim, Leonard will say that much for him. On the rare occasions he couldn’t find some wild adventure to drag them off on, he’d invent it himself.</p><p>If Jim were here with him now, he’d be chatting up a storm with every vendor they passed, bombarding them with questions about their wares: <i>Where are these grown? What kind of barrels do you use to age your wine? What’s this used for? How long have you been selling here?</i> Occasionally he’d run aground with some taciturn fellow who wouldn’t play along, but more often than not he’d succeed in striking up a real conversation, and stroll off ten minutes later with an armful of free samples and the inside scoop on where to find the best plums in the whole market. Hell, a few times Leonard even saw him score an invitation to family supper that night. (<i>Bring your quiet friend – he looks like he could use a good meal.</i>)</p><p>Most folks like to talk about themselves, Leonard supposes, and Jim’s natural inquisitiveness and warmth lent itself well to that sort of lighthearted chit-chat. He just had a way of winning people over. Leonard can appreciate that as well as anyone.</p><p>Leonard can’t possibly match that insatiable curiosity, but for Jim’s sake he resolves to take a stab at it. Jim wanted him to come here. If he’s ever going to figure out why, he’d best start playing along.</p><p>Deciding to start off easy, he approaches a table where a statuesque Xenafi’ian woman is presiding over a truly astounding selection of baked goods: cakes and tarts and loaves and pastries, mysterious round things the size of basketballs, delicate curlicues dusted with a fine pink powder. It all looks amazing and smells even better, though Leonard’s wary of what might be hiding inside some of those pretty glazed exteriors. He’s been duped into trying plenty of local delicacies over the years, and for every Ktarian chocolate puff, there’s been two heaping servings of jellied gree-worm or pickled teracaq eyeball.</p><p>“Hey there,” he says to the baker, with a smile he hopes doesn’t look as forced as it feels. “How’s it going?”</p><p>The baker doesn’t smile back. “If you are inquiring about my sales, they are currently within the expected range for this time of day.”</p><p>Okay, so she’s not going to help him out any. Leonard takes a second to regroup, scanning over the crowded table to buy himself time as he tries to think of a Jim-like question to ask. “So, uh…which one’s your favorite?”</p><p>She narrows her eye at him. “Every item I have for sale is of comparable quality and surpasses the standards set by the market regulatory committee.”</p><p>“I wasn’t trying to imply otherwise,” Leonard says, taken aback. Good God. Just his luck that he’d pick someone even worse at small talk than he is. “It wasn’t a trick question or anything. Just wanted to see what you’d recommend.”</p><p>“Dietary preference is highly personal,” the baker says. “There is no reason to believe that we share a similar palate, particularly since you are human and I am Xenafi’ian. It would be more constructive for you to inform me of your preferences, or to inquire about the ingredients of the items available.”</p><p>Leonard stares at her, baffled – and then it dawns on him.</p><p><i>Xenafi’i.</i> God, how could he have forgotten? This is that place where they’re even more insanely direct than Vulcans.</p><p>The Enterprise got sent here years ago on some diplomatic errand, early on in the five-year mission. It seemed like a pretty straightforward assignment, but what Command failed to anticipate was that the Xenafi’ians were so far up their own asses about their concept of absolute, unqualified honesty that they dismissed everyone else in the galaxy as a bunch of liars and swindlers. They couldn’t possibly deign to take the Starfleet representatives at their word, so to help along negotiations, they elected to dose the whole delegation’s ceremonial wine with what they euphemistically referred to as a “veracity enhancer.”</p>
<p></p><div>
  <p>
  <i>“A truth serum?” asks one of the lab assistants, sounding alarmed. Leonard can’t put a name to the face; she must be one of the new recruits they took on at the start of the mission. “But Dr. McCoy, sir, that’s sabotage. Isn’t it considered an act of aggression on the Xenafi’ians’ part, or – or chemical warfare, or something?”</i>
</p>
  <p>
    <i>“Ensign,” Leonard says distractedly, scanning back over his notes from the last goddamn truth drug he had to deal with, “on this ship, it’s Tuesday.”</i>
  </p>
</div><p>On the spectrum of truth serums the Enterprise crew encountered over the years, Leonard would place the Xenafi’ians’ drug squarely in the middle of the pack: more potent than sodium pentathol, less barbarically effective than Centaurian slugs. The Xenafi’ians’ version was memorable not so much for its efficacy, but for what appeared to be a remarkably broad definition of “truth,” which in Leonard’s opinion was an overly generous designation for all the sundry garbage that came spilling out of those afflicted. Passing thoughts and whims, shapeless barely formed ideas plucked seemingly at random from the victim’s subconscious – it all streamed out uncontrollably, even from the most tightly buttoned officers.</p>
<p></p><div>
  <p>
  <i>“Like vomit,” Uhura says, “oh my God, this is just like the time I – ”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>She claps an elegant hand over her mouth to stifle the rest of that thought, looking very much as though she’d prefer to be holding back actual vomit.</i>
</p>
</div><p>Jim got the worst of it, naturally. As the leader of the delegation, he probably received a megadose of the serum, and of course his body loved to wildly overreact to any old foreign substance it came across. Add in the fact that his supercharged mind always seemed to be hurtling at warp ten in about eighty-three different directions at once, and the result was pure chaos. The kid just <i>could not shut up</i>, and some of the thoughts that came pouring out of him…well, they weren’t exactly conducive to diplomacy.</p><p>It was hard to say who was more mortified when the delegation reappeared on the transporter pad: Jim, who had both hands clamped tight over his mouth and still wasn’t able to fully muffle the unintelligible sounds leaking out around the makeshift gag, or the other members of the delegation, who were all very pointedly looking anywhere but at their captain, even as they tried in vain to restrain their own babbling.</p>
<p></p><div>
  <p>
    <i>“It’s these goddamn X planets,” Leonard snaps, yanking Jim down the steps with an iron grip on his arm while simultaneously trying to keep the scanner in position and interpret the readings on the tricorder balanced in the crook of his elbow, the device beeping and flashing like a damn arcade game. “I keep telling you people – ”</i>
  </p>
  <p>
  <i>“There is no statistically significant correlation between planetary naming conventions and diplomatic incidents, Doctor,” Spock says, but before Leonard can argue back about the weird-ass shit they always turn up on these nightmare planets, Jim’s hands slip away from his mouth just enough for a breathless torrent of pleading to escape.</i>
</p>
  <p><i>“Bones please don’t make me go to medbay </i>please<i> I can’t let everyone see me like this please Bones just fix it I know you can fix it you fix everything you – ”</i></p>
  <p>
  <i>“Jesus H. Christ,” Leonard swears, and nearly drops his tricorder in his haste to haul Jim out of the transporter room, Spock and a miserable-looking Uhura hot on their heels, Christine’s voice following them out into the corridor as she and the other nurses set about wrangling the rest of the away team.</i>
</p>
</div><p>What a shitshow that was. It took days to formulate an antidote, and until it was ready each patient had to be individually quarantined for their own protection – and, frankly, for everyone else’s.</p><p>It wasn't that the condition was contagious - and thank God on high for that - but setting the poor bastards loose on the rest of the ship or even keeping them together in medbay could well have wreaked havoc on crew dynamics for years to come. There was no predicting what might cross a patient's mind at any given moment, and it seemed like the harder they tried to restrain themselves, the more vigorously the Xenafi’ians’ drug worked to loosen their lips. Better to cordon them each off separately and leave them to it, keeping their inane ramblings between them, their god, and whichever medbay staff were tasked with checking in on them throughout their ordeal.</p><p>Leonard learned a whole lot more than he ever intended to about some of his fellow crew members that mission: family baggage, secret romances, long-buried resentments, existential musings, childhood humiliations, regrets over choices made and chances not taken, preferences on everything from pizza toppings to undergarment fit to hook-up partners, and – perhaps most upsettingly of all – just enough insight into how exactly Uhura and Spock had spent that one off-record medical leave to make Leonard want to take a sterilizer to his brain.</p><p>And then there was Jim.</p>
<p></p><div>
  <p>
    <i>“Please tell me the antidote’s ready,” Jim says as Leonard walks in.</i>
  </p>
  <p>
  <i>It’s not, despite his and Spock’s best efforts, so instead of answering he just tosses an orange at Jim’s head. “Don’t be such a coward,” he says, setting down the rest of the food he’s brought and leaning against Jim’s desk, arms crossed over his chest. “Captain of the Starfleet flagship, hiding in here like a stowaway rat. It’s embarrassing.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>Jim groans and sinks lower in his chair. “What’s embarrassing is asking your first officer if he thinks he’ll ever like you as much as Ambassador Spock liked the other version of you.” He drops the orange onto his desk, where it rolls away until it hits a stack of PADDs. At least he’s likely getting through some of his backlog of paperwork. “So much for that. He’s not gonna respect me after this. No one is. You know half the brass still think I’m not fit for the job, and the crew probably agrees. We’re not even a month into this mission, and I’ve already – ”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Leonard says loudly, aiming to derail that train of thought before it can get too far. Jim seems to be doing slightly better than last night – he’s actually breathing between sentences, for one – but once he starts spiraling, it gets harder and harder to pull him out of it. Lord, but it must be exhausting living in his head all day. “Get over yourself, would you? So you stuck your foot in your mouth a few times. Big fuckin’ deal.”</i>
</p>
  <p><i>“Big fuckin’ – yes, Bones, it </i>is<i> a big fuckin’ deal,” Jim says, practically tripping over the words in his agitation. “I asked Pnoosh if their tribal plates got in the way when they blew their nose. I told Uhura I was glad we never hooked up, even though it probably would have been fantastic, for reasons I went into </i>in detail<i>. I was completely inappropriate. I’ll be lucky if they don’t both report me for – ”</i></p>
  <p>
    <i>“Give me a break. You were drugged, same as everybody else. No one’s reporting anybody over this mess.” Leonard unfolds his arms and nudges the sandwich he brought in Jim’s direction, pleased when Jim snatches it up immediately. If Jim wants to have himself a tantrum like a toddler, Leonard feels justified in distracting him like one. “Besides, you’ve said worse with half a bottle of gin in you.”</i>
  </p>
  <p>
  <i>Jim looks up from the sandwich to scowl at him. “That doesn’t make me feel any better.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“Wasn’t meant to,” Leonard says, because he’s not the one dosed up with a truth serum. “I’m just saying, there’s no point getting your panties in a twist over this. Your drunk ass has been telling me every fool thought that crosses your mind for years now, and you’re none the worse for it.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“Yeah, well, I don’t trust anyone else like I trust you,” Jim mutters sulkily, and takes the moodiest bite of turkey club imaginable.</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>Leonard hesitates, waiting for a postscript to that thought, but Jim doesn’t seem to realize what he’s said – or maybe he does, and he just doesn’t care. Maybe it wasn’t so much a slip of the tongue as a plain statement of fact. Of course Jim trusts him. If he didn’t, Leonard wouldn’t be here in his quarters with him, standing on the dangerous side of the door keeping out every other soul on the ship.</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“This turkey tastes like wet napkins,” Jim says. “You’re totally right about replicated meat. There’s something so fucking weird about it.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>A better man would rise above that temptation, but Leonard can’t resist pressing his advantage, however unfairly attained. “That so? What happened to – oh, what was it, now – the replication process reorganizing matter at the atomic level, resulting in an identical molecular structure that’s completely indistinguishable from animal-source meat?”</i>
</p>
  <p><i>“Well, it </i>is<i>,” Jim says with his mouth full. “But it’s still not the same. I’ve always thought that. I just like arguing with you about it.” He swallows and adds, “Dick move pushing me on that, by the way. It’s okay, though. I know you’re being an asshole on purpose to keep me distracted.”</i></p>
  <p>
  <i>Leonard shrugs, unfazed by the accusation. It’s not like he’s aiming for subtlety. “Is it working?”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“Not really. But I like that you’re trying.” Jim takes another bite of his sandwich. “It’s nice having you looking out for me. No one else ever bothered – just you and Pike. Fuck, I miss Pike so fucking much. I dream about him all the time. Do you think he’d be proud of me?”</i>
</p>
  <p>
    <i>Leonard freezes, thrown by the sudden swerve into a topic Jim rarely allows himself even a glancing allusion to. There are a hundred ways he could misstep here, but after a split-second rundown of his options, he decides the safest course is honesty. “Yeah. He would be.” And then, because Jim’s eyes look a little glassy and he could probably stand to hear it: “He was.”</i>
  </p>
  <p>
  <i>Jim blinks those big shiny blue eyes at him. “You think so?”</i>
</p>
  <p><i>It’s a sincere question, couldn’t be anything else, and Leonard is surprised by the anger that flares inside him at the uncertainty in Jim’s voice – at Pike, at himself, at everyone who got to Jim before them and ground him down so thoroughly that all these years later he still rears skittishly back from the suggestion that someone might actually care for him. “Of course he was. He </i>loved<i> you, Jim.” Jim’s eyes grow shinier still at that, and Leonard should change the damn subject already, spare Jim from a conversation he’s probably not ready to have, but the anger is still burning in his chest, gnawing at his heart with guilt-sharp little teeth, and as if he’s just downed a shot of the Xenafi’ians’ truth serum himself, he finds himself blurting out: “I do, too. You know that, don’t you?”</i></p>
  <p>
  <i>Jim smiles, a big wide dazzling smile, even as a renegade tear is breaking free to slip down the side of his nose. “I know,” he says, wiping absently at his eyes with the cuff of his undershirt. “You’re gonna stay with me, right? Because I really need you. I don’t know what I’d do without you – who I’d even be. Wow, that’s embarrassing, can we pretend I didn’t say that?”</i>
</p>
  <p><i>“No,” Leonard replies, a touch lightheaded with the relief that’s flooded through him, washing away the simmering heat of his guilt-tinged spell of temper. He knew, he </i>thought<i> he knew, but after everything they’ve been through in the past year, nothing could compare to the comfort of hearing it from Jim himself. “And obviously I’m staying with you, dumbass. I just signed on for five goddamn years on this flying deathtrap of yours, didn’t I?”</i></p>
  <p>
  <i>Jim’s smile this time is blinding. “Okay. Good.” He turns his attention back to his sandwich. “I’m so glad you’re here. I know you’re busy working on the antidote, but I feel better when you’re around. Even though you keep bringing me vegetables we both know I’m not gonna eat. I’m hiding this salad the second your back is turned so I can get rid of it when you’re gone.” He winces. “Fuck.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>Leonard does his best to hold it in, he truly does, but he can’t stop himself from losing it at that – just flat-out laughing in Jim’s face. This damn kid, he thinks to himself, giddy with a surge of the absurd uncontainable joy that comes over him sometimes when Jim does something to remind him of just why he’s out here chasing the lunatic all over God’s creation. All the sordid and vulnerable things he’s admitted to in the past two days, and here he is flustered about being foiled in his plot to avoid eating his greens. He really is a toddler.</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>He half expects his reaction to earn him another sulk, but when he finally manages to get a hold of himself, Jim is looking up at him with naked affection writ large across his unguarded face. “I love your dimples,” he says earnestly. “You’re so gorgeous when you laugh. When you smile at all. I wish you’d do it more. But, actually, I’m kind of glad you don’t smile for most people. Mainly just me. I like that. Makes me feel like I’m doing something right. And you smile at your patients sometimes – that’s good too. I wish I could’ve had you as a doctor when I was younger. Especially after – ”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“You got mayo on that PADD,” Leonard interjects, recognizing that they’re about to take a hard left into dangerous terrain. Dammit, he should have cut Jim off ages ago instead of letting him babble on stroking his ego.</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>Luckily, the serum must have made Jim more gullible, too, because he falls for Leonard’s weak-ass lie without hesitation, his pensive expression shifting swiftly into dismay and then confusion as he looks down at the array of screens on his desk.</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>Leonard seizes on his momentary distraction. “And you’re eating that salad if I have to force-feed you. A man can’t survive on wet napkins alone.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>It’s not his best joke, but Jim laughs anyway, a goofy snorting laugh that sparks a glow of warmth in Leonard’s chest. “You’re never gonna let me live that down, are you?”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“Not hardly.” Leonard offers him a genuine smile this time, peculiarly aware of the way Jim’s whole face brightens in response. “Now go on, eat. The sooner you finish up, the sooner I can get back to finding the fix for this latest mess you’ve blundered into.”</i>
</p>
  <p><i>“I didn’t </i>do<i> anything!” Jim protests, outraged.</i></p>
  <p>
  <i>“Yeah, yeah,” Leonard says. “That’s what you always say. Eat your damn salad.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
    <i>Jim eats the damn salad, and the orange too, and the rest of his not-really-turkey sandwich, running his mouth the whole time about his weird dream last night and the crush he had on Taylor Prewitt in the fifth grade and the time he got a nosebleed in the middle of giving a blowjob and the message from his mom he’s definitely not responding to until after they fix his little “problem.”</i>
  </p>
  <p>
  <i>It’s fine. Leonard’s been looking after this idiot in one way or another for going on six years already. He figures he may as well just keep on doing it.</i>
</p>
</div><p>Leonard abruptly realizes the baker is still watching him with that soul-shrivellingly unimpressed expression, waiting for a response. Jesus, he’s out of it. How long has he been standing here like a slack-jawed idiot, lost in his own thoughts? He never had the best social skills to begin with, but all this time he’s been spending cloistered alone on his ship clearly isn’t doing him any favors.</p><p>“Oh, uh,” he says, clearing his throat and glancing hurriedly away from the baker’s cool stare, “yeah, you’re right. I wasn’t thinking straight, I guess.” He points at one of the mystery basketballs. “So, what’s this?”</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>He gets a little of almost everything in the end, partly to make up for his awkwardness, but mostly because it’s been ages since he had real food and it all sounds incredible: some sweet things, some savory, and not a single pickled eyeball to be found in the whole bunch. The baker wraps it all up for him in tidy parcels and sends him off with a heavy delicious-smelling bag and a goodbye that could charitably be described as friendly, probably glad both for his patronage and for the fact that she’s getting rid of him.</p><p>He sincerely doubts Jim brought him all this way for the sole purpose of embarrassing him in front of a pretty woman – though the jackass would likely consider it an unexpected bonus – so he continues wandering around the bazaar, keeping an eye out for anything that might be a message while making painfully businesslike conversation with one vendor after another.</p><p>He's keenly aware of the judgmental looks he's getting from sellers and shoppers alike. His questioning must sound even stranger to their ears than it does to his own: it's been a few years since they joined the Federation, but most other species are probably still inclined to give Xenafi’i and its holier-than-thou citizens a wide berth, so they can't have too many outsiders passing through. And it's not like he can explain that he's just poking around in search of some unspecified clue his dead partner may or may not have left him, which means he ends up paying his way with more impulse purchases in an effort to smooth things over: a pretty bouquet of zinnias to liven up his dreary living quarters, a few sprigs of an aromatic rosemary-like herb to spruce up his replicated meals, a jug of local wine that he’s <i>mostly</i> confident isn’t drugged this time.</p><p>He's already exhausted from his efforts when he comes across a bookseller hawking old-fashioned books printed on the silky tissue-thin local equivalent of paper. Jim would have been beside himself at such a bounty, so Leonard lingers at the stall for a while, paging through book after book, which are all gibberish to him, of course. The bookseller gamely tries to direct him toward a handful of books he claims are written in Terran languages, even digging one out that’s supposedly been translated into Federation Standard. The contents are little more than word salad, but the man looks so proud of his find that Leonard makes plenty of polite noises anyway before ultimately selecting a different book to take with him: a hefty green-bound thing filled with some flowy mysterious script, the front cover prettily illustrated with a gilded tree that reminds him a little of the design from their headboard. It’ll be nice to look at, anyway. And Jim’s good with languages; maybe he can make something of it.</p><p>But while Leonard’s sure that Jim is enjoying his fish-out-of-water bumbling, he’s less certain about his larger purpose in being here. He still hasn’t found anything that feels like it’s really trying to communicate something to him, and when the crowd thins and the vendors start packing it in for the day, he’s forced to admit defeat.</p><p>The sun is sinking behind the eastern city wall as he casts one last hopeful glance around the plaza, searching in vain for any sign of Jim’s presence, some disguised treasure or coded message meant for his eyes alone. There’s nothing. Nothing Leonard can see, anyhow. Maybe he should have made more of an effort to get himself invited home with someone for dinner, or thought up a different series of question to ask the fruit seller or the cobbler.</p><p>Too late for that now. It’ll be dark soon, and the wind is picking up, bitingly cold, sharpening to a shrill howl that whispers uncomfortably over Leonard’s nerves. Besides, it’s been a mighty long time since he’s done so much walking, and his legs and feet are killing him, sore and heavy from pounding the cobblestones all day. His back is complaining, too, and his arms feel about ready to fall off after lugging all his parcels around for so long. Pitiful. He really <i>is</i> out of shape. Maybe that’s why Jim brought him here, he thinks wryly – just to lure him off the ship and get him some damn exercise. Now who’s the one looking after whom?</p><p>Either way, he's beat, and he can't wait to sit down and dig into some of the pastries he got earlier. He hoists his packages into a more secure grip and turns to start making his way back to his ship. Maybe he’ll have better luck tomorrow.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>Back on the ship, he sets down his parcels with a sigh of relief and trudges over to the replicator – he hasn’t talked so much in a long time, either, and he’s dying for a glass of water – only to see that the replicator is already blinking at him, patiently signaling that it’s got something waiting.</p><p>Ah. There it is. And isn’t that just like Jim, dragging Leonard out on some wild goose chase when he could’ve made his point right here and saved him the trouble. Leonard shakes his head, feeling a once-familiar hint of exasperated fondness welling up inside him. It seems the kid hasn’t lost his taste for inventing adventures.</p><p>It could be anything – an ice cream sundae, a fried egg, a burrito, a shot of tequila – but somehow Leonard’s not surprised when he eases up the front panel to find an orange, a salad, and a turkey sandwich crowded onto the replication disk.</p><p>A sound bursts out of him, loud and hoarse, unrestrained. It takes him a second to recognize it as <a href="https://youtu.be/_uspH4rki_M">laughter</a>.</p><p>He picks up the orange, which is smooth and unblemished, perfectly round, flawless in every precisely constructed detail. It might have been turkey once. Or napkins.</p><p>“I don’t think any of this will keep, kid,” he says aloud, and sits down right then and there to eat the meal Jim's offered him despite the fact that he's got plenty of fresh food from the market to choose from – because unlike some people, he’s capable of following instructions without needing his damn arm twisted.</p><p>On a whim, he tries his hand at removing the orange peel the way Jim used to, all in one long unbroken spiral. Jim always said doing it that way made the fruit taste better, which was horseshit, of course. He just liked making everything a little more complicated than it had to be.</p><p>Leonard can’t quite manage to get the whole peel off in one piece, but that’s all right. He thinks Jim would probably appreciate the <a href="https://youtu.be/emyKS5v2HY4">attempt</a>.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>♥</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0009"><h2>9. Chapter 9</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Hi, friends. Drink some water, please. Think about taking a walk later, if it's nice out. Let some of that physical tension go. Be good to yourself. You're worth caring for.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Oh, you crazy son of a bitch,” Leonard breathes, staring out the viewscreen at the hulking shape looming up in front of him.</p>
<p>It’s nighttime, the depthless kind of pitch dark night you only see on pre-industrial planets. Dark enough that Leonard can barely make out the glint of the sea below, the faint reflection of starlight wobbling over the surface of the water, and damn Jim to hell, anyway. He <i>knows</i> Leonard is no great fan of the open ocean. Especially at night. It gives him the creeps to look down at that hazy mirrored expanse of black water and imagine what could be looming there, just out of sight. It could be nothing, but it could be <i>something</i>, and the taunting ambiguity of what might be hiding a mere hair’s breadth beyond his ability to perceive it is ten times worse than if he could see it for what it is, understand the size and shape of it, however terrible.</p>
<p>On the whole, though, given his current predicament, the darkness is very much a good thing. Any higher visibility would risk the ship attracting all kinds of unwelcome attention, and this time Jim wouldn’t be the one taking the fall for it, though it is once again most definitely his fault.</p>
<p>Now, to be fair – Jim can’t speak up in his own defense, so it falls to Leonard to fill in the blanks of what he’d say – it’s probably not a coincidence that they’re arriving under the cover of night, and a moonless night at that. The AI has also activated some kind of stealth mode Leonard didn’t even know the ship had, and so far they seem to have been able to keep over the sea itself and avoid the islands where they’re more likely to be spotted.</p>
<p>That’s all well and good, but none of it makes up for the fact that Jim apparently has his fearless little heart set on <i>flying into a damn volcano</i>.</p>
<p>Why Jim even wants to revisit Nibiru in the first place is a mystery. Their exploits here led directly to what must have been one of the absolute worst days of his life: Spock ratting him out about the Prime Directive, Pike laying into him, losing the Enterprise, the attack on Daystrom and Pike’s death. Leonard’s hard-pressed to think of a planet they’ve been to that he’d expect Jim to remember less fondly. It doesn’t strike him as the kind of place a man would choose to linger.</p>
<p>But here they are, and if Leonard's understanding what he's seeing on the nav screens correctly, they're sneaking back to the very place that ended up nearly costing Jim everything. Right down into the gaping mouth of that massive dormant volcano.</p>
<p>Jesus, that thing had <i>better</i> still be dormant.</p>
<p>“No chases this time, all right?” Leonard says sternly, glaring down at the blinking blue screens of the nav console for lack of a better focal point. “Those are my terms. I’ll play along for now, but the second I catch wind of one of your little spear-hurling friends, we are <i>outta</i> here. I mean that.”</p>
<p>The ship tilts, following the incline of the volcano’s exterior en route to the destination Jim’s chosen for them, and Leonard screws his eyes shut, fingers numb from how hard he's gripping the edge of the console.</p>
<p>Lord almighty. It just figures that not even death itself could stop this kid from dragging him into trouble.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>The inside of the volcano is – not to put too fine a point on it – dark as an absolute motherfucker. The ship drifts through the black in a bubble of its own light, like one of those deep-sea creatures with a bioluminescent lamp sticking out of its head. They must be keeping a good distance from the inner walls, as Leonard has yet to catch a glimpse of them within range of the headlight. It’s just endless darkness all around, removed from even the weak light of the stars outside. They may as well be out in the void, for all Leonard can tell.</p>
<p>He jerks back in surprise as the viewscreen is suddenly filled with – <i>something</i>, some massive black stone monstrosity, the ridges and grooves of its craggy surface thrown into sharp relief by the headlight. The ship moves on too quickly for him to make sense of what he’s seen, but a few seconds later the light sweeps across another rough-hewn structure, and this one looks to be a kind of pillar, a jagged column as thick as an old redwood, so tall Leonard can’t make out either the top or bottom of it.</p>
<p>What are formations like that doing inside a volcano, he wonders, and in asking himself the question, the answer comes to him. They must be volcanic rock – huge sprays of magma frozen solid in the space of an instant.</p>
<p>Mother of God. Spock was really cutting it close on this one.</p>
<p>Leonard’s just glad the AI is doing the lion’s share of managing their descent. If it were left up to him, he’d probably crash them right into one of those pillars, and that would be the end of this little adventure.</p>
<p>At long last, the rippling black floor of the volcano appears below. The ship touches down in the gap between two towering columns of rock, and the nav screens go dark as the chipper voice of the AI announces they’ve arrived at their destination.</p>
<p><i>“Ambient temperature is four point two one degrees Celsius,”</i> it adds helpfully. <i>“Gas balance is within an acceptable range to support human respiration. Supplementary oxygen is not required.”</i></p>
<p>The ship hums, the muted whir of systems settling into standby mode. The cockpit lights dim, and Leonard hears from behind him a muffled pop and hiss that can only be the breaking of the seal around the main door.</p>
<p>Real subtle.</p>
<p>Leonard looks out the viewscreen at the forbidding stone landscape and grimaces. Jim better not want him to go too far. He didn’t exactly bring any damn spelunking equipment with him.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>He holds tight to the railing as he descends the external steps. It’s hard to see in front of him with the light from the main cabin at his back, his way illuminated only by the strip of tiny glinting blue dots marking the edge of each step. Maybe he should go back, hunt around for a flashlight. There must be one stashed with the emergency maintenance kit, wherever that is.</p>
<p>Then again, if he turns around now, he may lose his nerve entirely. He’s never thought of this ship as being overly cozy, but compared with the ink-dark bowels of Mount Nightmare, his comfortless fluorescent-lit bunk is sounding mighty inviting right about now.</p>
<p>As it is, he hesitates for a good long while at the bottom of the stairs, debating with himself over the wisdom of prying his hand off the railing and taking that final step onto the ground. Some irrational part of his brain is convinced that it’s not solid, that he’ll sink into it like mud or quicksand and get trapped here forever, or even that the brittle crust of rock will give entirely and he’ll plunge down into the scalding magma below.</p>
<p>He’s being absurd. It’s not an iced-over pond he’s dealing with. For those gigantic formations to still be standing after all this time, the freeze must have gone deep. It’s holding up the ship, isn’t it?</p>
<p>Besides, Jim wouldn’t bring him here if it weren’t safe – but then, what the hell does Jim know from safe, anyhow? The man is a goddamn lunatic.</p>
<p>Was.</p>
<p>Is.</p>
<p>“God damn it,” Leonard mutters to himself, and lets go of the railing.</p>
<p>He sets a foot out on the rock, tentatively at first, just grazing the surface with the sole of his boot, and when it feels solid to the touch he takes a deep breath of musty air and steps down with his full weight. It’s fine. It’s <i>fine</i>. He got himself all worked up over nothing.</p>
<p>“Okay, kid,” he says, and embarrasses himself by flinching, spooked by the eerie echo of his own voice. He drops down to a whisper. “Here we are. Your move.”</p>
<p>There’s no response. Not that he really expected one.</p>
<p>He’s not entirely sure what to do from here. There doesn’t seem to be much <i>to</i> do. Maybe he should venture out farther, go inspect one of those rock formations or something?</p>
<p>He shoots a doubtful glance toward the nearest one, a good fifteen meters to his left, barely visible in the spillover glow from the ship’s headlight.</p>
<p>The hell with that. If Jim wants him to go all the way over there, he’s going to have to ask more directly. And maybe turn up the damn lights. Until then, Leonard’s staying right where he is, thank you.</p>
<p>He decides to at least move around to the front of the ship, where he can take better advantage of the bright beam of the headlight. The frozen magma is uneven beneath his boots, curving and slanted, and he picks his way with exaggerated care, wary of catching his heel on some rough edge or putting a foot wrong and losing his balance. The last thing he needs is to trip and crack his head open. His little ship may be pretty smart, but he doubts it knows how to work a protoplaser.</p>
<p>Safely positioned by the headlight, Leonard peers along its blue-tinted beam, squinting to see if he can discern anything that might be hiding nearby, cloaked in darkness. There’s nothing to be seen, just the frozen sea of black rock spreading out around him in every direction. He can’t hear anything, either – which may be the most unsettling thing of all, now that he’s noticed it. All those years spent traipsing around the galaxy after Jim led him into more than his fair share of dank, dark caves and sinister underground tunnel systems, and it was always the <i>sounds</i> that rattled him the most: the slow plucking drip of water, the rustle of colossal supercolonies of alien bats just waiting to be disturbed, the amplified skitter of claws or scaled feet or a thousand tiny legs from some other nightmarish creature scuttling into its crevice.</p>
<p>Here, though, there’s none of that. No water, no creepy-crawlies, no unnatural footsteps or high-pitched chitters rising out of the shadows. There’s not a single whisper of sound except for the hum of the ship at Leonard’s back, a strangely comforting presence down here in the pitch-black nothing.</p>
<p>So much for his theory about Jim wanting to be around people. If the Nibirans have come through here at any point since the thwarted eruption, they’ve left no traces of themselves behind. From the looks of things, it seems equally plausible that Leonard is the first living being to set eyes on the place in years, maybe since the very day Spock tumbled in here with his cold fusion device and nearly got himself killed in the process.</p>
<p>Leonard hates to think what it would have been like when the volcano was active, when all this rock was red-hot molten lava, roiling and bubbling, lunging this way and that, shooting hundred-meter spires up from the depths and belching out suffocating black clouds of ash and smoke. It must have looked like the bowels of hell itself.</p>
<p>And yet, somehow, Spock stood in the midst of all that and argued with them to leave him here to die.</p>
<p>Leonard couldn’t believe his ears then, and it’s even harder to wrap his head around now, with a clearer mental image of the gruesome fate Spock was facing down. How was he not <i>begging</i> them to get him out by any means possible? If Leonard had been in his place, the Prime Directive would’ve been the last thing on his mind, that’s for damn sure.</p>
<p>Of course, if the intervening years have taught him anything, it’s that Spock can be a real contrary bastard himself when the mood strikes him. He was just lucky that he was up against someone even more pigheaded that day.</p>
<p></p><div>
  <p>
  <i>“If Spock were here and I were there,” Jim says, just quiet enough that Leonard knows the question is meant for him alone, “what would he do?”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>Leonard wishes like hell he could give a different answer, but he’s not in the habit of bullshitting Jim when it matters. “He’d let you die.”</i>
</p>
</div><p>Something cold and sickly twists deep down in Leonard’s gut. Is <i>that</i> why Jim brought him here? As a reproach for failing him on Xulos – for letting him die?</p>
<p>Almost before he can finish the thought, he’s dismissing it. He feels low and mean for even considering the possibility that Jim would want to punish him like that, that he could ever be vindictive enough to throw the most painful failure of Leonard’s life back in his face. It’s not the man Jim was when he was alive, and it’s not whatever he is now, the invisible force that offers Leonard gifts of seashells and oranges, that knocks things off his desk like a misbehaving cat and winds sweet-smelling honeysuckle vines around his ankle while he sleeps.</p>
<p>No, Jim would never be so deliberately cruel to him. He’d be hurt by the very suggestion.</p>
<p><i>I’m sorry</i>, Leonard thinks, in case…well. Just, in case. <i>I know you wouldn’t. I do know that.</i></p>
<p>So what is it, then? Why is he here?</p>
<p>He still hasn’t worked out what it is Jim wants, exactly. Taken individually, most of his coded messages have seemed straightforward enough – <i>pay attention, go here, eat this</i> – but Leonard doesn’t yet understand what Jim is really trying to tell him, why he’s been leading him on this rambling pilgrimage from one ass-end of the galaxy to the other. He doesn’t get how all the tiny clues fit together into whatever bigger story Jim might be constructing. He doesn’t know Jim’s end goal, the <i>point</i> of all this.</p>
<p>Maybe there isn’t one. Maybe it’s all been aimless wandering on Jim’s part, retracing his steps, whatever’s left of him drawn instinctively back to the places he’s been, the same way he’s drawn to Leonard.</p>
<p>Leonard doesn’t think so, though. He still has that nagging sense of being caught up in one of Jim’s schemes. Jim’s driving at something, he’d bet on that much. And that means Jim brought him here, to the inside of this dark, frozen volcano, for a reason.</p>
<p>Leonard forces himself to think beyond that exchange on the bridge, the bitter taste of fear in his mouth as Sulu brought them up out of the sea. Jim <i>didn’t</i> let Spock die, after all. He refused to abandon him to his fate, risked everything to get him out – because Spock was his friend, because he cared about him, because he couldn’t bring himself to leave a man behind.</p>
<p>He never could. He grew a lot over the next few years, cooled off a bit, made peace with the past and settled into himself, but some things were just hard-coded into him, and his loyalty to his crew was one of them. Part of it was the same ironclad resolve which made him such a force to be reckoned with as a captain, that dogged determination to wrench out a win in the face of overwhelming odds.</p>
<p>But there was more to it than that, as Leonard well knows. Jim understood better than anyone how it felt to be left behind, given up on. His whole life up until joining Starfleet was a master class in that particular subject, and yet when the time came to put those lessons into practice, he did what Jim Kirk did so very well: he rebelled. He would not, could not give up on his crew, his <i>family</i>, and if that meant violating the Prime Directive or lying to Command or climbing up into the radiation-flooded heart of his ship to fix a misaligned injector – well, so be it.</p>
<p>Maybe that’s why he brought Leonard here. It could be that simple: an explanation for why Jim’s still hanging around, a reminder that he’ll never abandon the people he loves.</p>
<p>Or maybe…maybe it’s a different kind of reminder.</p>
<p></p><div>
  <p>
  <i>“The nerve of that ungrateful bastard,” Leonard grumbles, sloshing a generous finger of brandy into his glass. “You’d think we shot his dog rather than saving his life.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“That’s Spock for you,” Jim says dully. “Never met a rule he wouldn’t defend to the death.” His buzz of triumph at Spock’s rescue faded hours ago, and the ebb seems to have left him mired in a rare spell of pessimism, disheartened and subdued. He sighs and looks down at his own untouched snifter of brandy. “Whatever. He’ll get over it. No harm, no foul, right?”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“Right,” Leonard says. Frankly, he’s not so sure, either of the potential foul or of Spock’s inclination to let it slide, but Jim sounds like he’s trying to convince himself more than anything, and this melancholic funk of his is making Leonard uneasy. He’s not used to Jim doubting himself. It goes against the natural order of things.</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>Jim swirls his brandy around, watches it lap against the gently sloping sides of the snifter. “You really think he would have left me there if the tables were turned.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>It’s halfway between a statement and a question, and Leonard eyes him warily for a few seconds before answering, trying to get a read on where his head is at. “You don’t?”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>Jim blows out a noisy breath, slouching down even further as he does so, deflating in front of Leonard’s eyes. “No, you’re right. I know he would have.” He runs a hand through his hair, tugs at it the way he does sometimes when he’s struggling to put his thoughts into words. “I just – I don’t get it. I thought…” He trails off, shaking his head, with a look on his face that makes Leonard want to go find Spock and toss him back into the damn volcano.</i>
</p>
  <p><i>“Of course you don’t get it,” Leonard says. “You’re </i>you<i>. You and the Vulcan, you ain’t wired the same. Not even close.” He clinks his glass against Jim’s before raising it to his lips, and adds under his breath: “Thank God.”</i></p>
  <p>
  <i>Jim’s mouth twitches up on one side – better than nothing, but nowhere near the laugh Leonard was aiming for. He dips a fingertip into his brandy and runs it lightly around the delicate crystal rim of the glass, making it sing. “Bones?”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“Hmm?”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“What would you have done?”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>Leonard cocks an eyebrow at him. “You gotta be kidding me.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“Come on, humor me,” Jim says, trying for a smile that falls well short of the mark.</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“No, I mean – ” Leonard can’t believe he has to spell this out. “Look, did I or did I not chase your dumb ass right off the edge of a goddamn cliff today?”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>Jim’s face relaxes into a real smile, lines sketching out from his eyes. “You did.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>Leonard gestures with his snifter. “Well, there you go.” He takes another well-earned sip of brandy and shakes his head, incredulous. “‘What would I have done’ – the fuck kind of question is that.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
    <i>“You jumped off a cliff with me,” Jim says, grinning wider, a touch of his earlier delight creeping back into his voice. “That was badass, Bones.”</i>
  </p>
  <p>
  <i>“Folie à deux,” Leonard says dryly, and watches with satisfaction as Jim finally lifts his glass to drink.</i>
</p>
</div><p>Leonard’s skin prickles, an icy shiver of disquiet skittering up his spine.</p>
<p><i>What would you have done?</i> Jim asked him that day, when what he wanted to know was: <i>Are you going to give up on me, too?</i></p>
<p><i>Never</i>, Leonard answered, and he meant it – meant it every time he swore that he’d follow Jim anywhere, that he’d never ever leave him. He must have renewed that vow a hundred times over the years, once or twice to Jim himself, but more often in the quiet of his own heart, and more often still in the <i>doing</i> of it, because a promise was just empty words unless you lived it, held to it.</p>
<p>And he did, he did hold to it, over and over again throughout their years together, and never more so than when he was faced with Jim’s cold body on his slab just a few short days after they left this place. He’d thought his first oath sacrosanct, sacred above all else, but given the choice – the ancient words he’d parroted at his white coat ceremony a dozen years before, or <i>Jim</i> – he cast it aside without a moment’s hesitation. He would always choose Jim, even when that meant betraying his office to play at God, to follow Jim the farthest he’d ever gone and drag him back home.</p>
<p>But then…</p>
<p>Another shiver rushes up Leonard’s spine. There’s a cold sweat breaking out on his skin, a slow-building horror growing in the pit of his stomach – because <i>didn’t</i> he give up on Jim, in the end? Didn’t they all? They never truly figured out what happened on Xulos. They never found Jim’s body, never found a single piece of him, and they just accepted that, like a bunch of idiots, shook their heads and wiped their tears and accepted that Jim was gone – but he <i>wasn’t</i>, he wasn’t gone at all, Leonard knows that now, and that means –</p>
<p>
  <i>Bones?</i>
</p>
<p>They left him behind. They gave him up as a lost cause and left him there, down in that fathomless black abyss or wherever he was. Leonard <i>left</i> him – the way so many others had before, the way he always swore he never would.</p>
<p>Christ, no wonder Jim’s been clinging to him so tight. He had to, he’d have been lost otherwise, because Leonard packed up and abandoned him just when he needed him most.</p>
<p>How could it have taken him this long to realize? He’s been so selfish, so singularly focused on the relief of having this small part of Jim still with him that he never stopped to think what that meant for the man who vanished on Xulos, the man he claims to love – the man who cried out for him at the end of it all, who begged to the very last moment to be <i>found</i>.</p>
<p>What happened to him that day? Where did he go in that wind-muffled hour between his final plea for help and the search team’s arrival on the cliff?</p>
<p>Sulu and Scotty were right. There <i>was</i> something more going on, something they missed in all their endless analysis of the log file and their fruitless scouring of the bleak Xulosi terrain. Something that rattled Jim to his core, that swallowed him whole and spit him out the other side as this echo of himself, this whisper in the dark.</p>
<p>He tried to tell them. Tried again on that corrupted recording, the twenty-four seconds that finally succeeded in reminding Leonard of what he should have known all along.</p>
<p><i>Something’s wrong</i>, Jim said.</p>
<p><i>Please</i>, he said.</p>
<p>
  <i>Bones?</i>
</p>
<p>Xulos, the Frillari system, that whole corner of the galaxy – none of it’s ever been properly charted, properly studied. Their readings from Xulos never made a lick of sense, but they let themselves get distracted, bogged down by what they thought they understood of science and technology and hard data, when every one of them ought to know better than to expect a strange new world to play nicely by the established rules. <i>Especially</i> one that starts with an X.</p>
<p>How stupid could they have been? They’d all seen the impossible with their own eyes: incomprehensible snags in the space-time continuum, alternate realities and interdimensional travel, a planet erased from the very fabric of existence. And Leonard, who had not just seen the impossible but <i>done</i> it, who’d watched a dead man’s fingers twitch on top of a white hospital blanket when weeks before they were curled cold and gray and lifeless against the inside of a body bag – even Leonard forgot what the universe was capable of. What <i>Jim</i> was capable of.</p>
<p>Jim didn’t bring him here as punishment; that’s not the man he is. He’s just reminding Leonard of his promise. He doesn’t want an apology – he wants Leonard to do better, to <i>not give up on him</i>.</p>
<p>What if Jim isn’t here with him by design? Leonard’s been imagining him stubbornly fighting his way back from the great beyond, but what if he never even made it that far? What if he’s stuck, caught in limbo between life and death or in some transdimensional pocket of non-existence, trapped and unable to find his way out? What if he needs Leonard’s help to move on, or –</p>
<p>Or –</p>
<p>No. No, fuck, no, he can’t let himself think it, can’t even let his mind wander too close to the possibility. If he lets himself go down that path, and he’s <i>wrong</i>…</p>
<p>He’s too late. It’s already taken hold inside him, that tiny selfish kernel he’s been carrying with him all this time breaking open to twine roots around his bones. It’ll kill him if he’s wrong, eat him alive and destroy him from the inside out, but what’s done is done.</p>
<p>He hopes. For the first time since Spock told him they were leaving Xulos, he <i>hopes</i>.</p>
<p>He has to remind himself to breathe, struggling to steady himself against the rush of competing emotions that have surged back to life inside him, guilt and gratitude and regret and fear and <i>hope</i>. It doesn’t help, so he tries again, breathes in as slow and deep as he can, only this time there’s a sweet, cloying scent laid overtop the stale damp, carrying with it a shockwave of tangled-up memories: Georgia summers and the gray light of pre-dawn, stiff limbs and a tug on his ankle and Jim’s red-smeared mouth. Jim clinging to him, smiling at him, telling him it would be okay, believing with all his immeasurably faithful heart that Leonard could save him from anything and everything.</p>
<p>Leonard whips his head around to look for the source, searching for another vine growing up out of the frozen black rock as incongruously as the first one grew from the barren earth on Jhonta, but there’s nothing there.</p>
<p>That’s okay. What he’s really looking for is out there somewhere in the darkness, far beyond the reach of the ship’s light. He can’t see him, but he knows he’s there, feels him there, as surely as he once felt his blood-hot fingers wrapped around his wrist.</p>
<p>He closes his eyes and <a href="https://youtu.be/Rq_TT4GjaRo">breathes</a>.</p>
<p>“Jim.” The echo of his own voice doesn’t scare him this time. There’s a kind of beauty in the sound of Jim’s name, clear and resonant, swelling to fill the emptiness around him – like a bell, or a pipe organ, the first note of a hymn ringing out in a quiet sanctuary. Sacred, above all else. “Jim, sweetheart, you’ve got to help me, okay? I swear to you, whatever it is, whatever you need, I’ll do it, but you’ve got to keep helping me. I know you’ve been trying. I’m sorry I haven’t been a better listener.”</p>
<p>He’s sorry for so much. He’s failed Jim so badly, in the worst possible ways, but he won’t let him down again. He’ll figure all this out, whatever it takes, wherever it leads him. He’ll follow Jim anywhere, to the great divide itself and farther still, if that’s where they’re headed. Anywhere Jim wants, so long as he brings Leonard with him.</p>
<p>His hands flex at his sides, restless with the instinct to reach out, to grab onto whatever he can and hang on with all his might, the same way Jim’s been hanging onto him. He reaches into his pocket instead, folds his fingers around the seashell halves he’s taken to keeping there – those lost little broken things he found on Piaj, brought together in the palm of his hand. A coincidence, he thought at the time, but he knows better now. It was a gift, a message – and maybe, just maybe, a promise.</p>
<p>“Just…just hold on a little longer, kid. Stay with me. I’m not giving up on you, so don’t you give up on me, all right?” He tightens his grip on the seashell pieces, their broken edges digging sharply into his skin. “Stay with me, Jim. <i>Please.</i>”</p>
<p><i>Please, please</i>, Jim’s voice <a href="https://youtu.be/6L4Ojl8bVdc">echoes</a> inside his chest – a warning tremor, shivering through the bedrock of pain he’s carried with him for so long, making it quake.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>♥</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0010"><h2>10. Chapter 10</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Hey y'all. We've got a longer chapter than usual ahead of us, so let's get right into it. I hope you're doing well and receiving at least half as much joy in your regular life as you bring to me with your comments!</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It takes Leonard a while to figure out where to go from Nibiru.</p>
<p>He throws himself into research, hunting feverishly for answers about what could have become of Jim – or, failing that, at least someone or something that might be able to point him in the right direction. The good news is that there’s no shortage of potential leads. He’s far from the only desperate sucker out there looking to bridge the gap between life and death, and where there’s a demand, there’s a supply: a temple on some moon in the Welis system where the priestesses are said to have the power of resurrection, a remote cave high atop a mountain on Dabratu where people make pilgrimages to commune with the dead, a soothsayer on Qef III famous for his flashy public seances. </p>
<p>The bad news is that all of it leaves Leonard cold. He doesn’t feel the same pull to any of those places that he did to Jhonta or Xenafi’i or Nibiru, the sense of being ushered along on a path that had already been laid for him.</p>
<p>And Jim has been unusually quiet on the subject. There are no coordinates spontaneously manifesting in the nav system, no vaguely familiar planets or colonies catching Leonard’s eye on the map. Wherever they may be headed next, it’s apparently up to Leonard to figure it out.</p>
<p>He wrestles with the possibility of heading straight back to Xulos. He doesn’t feel a pull there, either, but it’s where Jim vanished; it stands to reason that it’s where Leonard might be able to find him again.</p>
<p>It’d be a tricky thing, getting there. More than tricky. To say they didn't leave Xulos in good standing would be an understatement. That final report to Command advised in no uncertain terms that any hope of establishing formal relations between the Federation and Xulos’s leadership was probably torched for at least a generation or two. It’d been a gamble to start with, trying to bring them into the fold, and it became painfully clear that the Enterprise’s crew was driving another nail into the coffin of diplomacy with every minute they overstayed their welcome and continued messing around in one of the Xulosis’ most sacred sites.</p>
<p>Even if Leonard could manage to sneak down to the planet’s surface without getting caught, what would he do then? They already spent so long searching for Jim, turning over every stone, interrogating every captured rebel the Supreme Council grudgingly allowed them access to, trying a hundred different ways to map the abyss or figure out how to venture down into it within killing themselves in the attempt. None of it got them anywhere. Leonard doesn’t know what the fuck the <i>xyrta</i> did to Jim – if, in fact, that’s where he ended up – but he damn sure knows it’s not giving him back without a fight.</p>
<p>Leonard’s not ready for that fight yet. He wouldn’t know where to begin. If he goes back to Xulos, he suspects he’ll have one shot, and he can’t waste it on a half-assed rush job. He needs to learn more about what could have happened to Jim, how he ended up trapped in this formless liminal state, where he <i>is</i> now and how to get him out of there – and if there’s even the slightest chance he could return the way he went.</p>
<p>Hell, for all Leonard knows, that stormy hellhole may not even be where this path is leading them. Jim has come all this way with him, followed him halfway across the galaxy now with no noticeable waning of his presence. If anything, he’s gotten stronger, better able to communicate. Maybe he’s not tied to Xulos at all anymore. Maybe he’s just tied to Leonard.</p>
<p>Leonard feels ashamed of the guilty flush of affection that ripples through him at the thought. It feels wrong to take any comfort in Jim’s apparent attachment to him. What other choice does the man have? Leonard is his most likely ticket out of wherever the fuck he is. He’s stuck with him, whether he wants to be or not.</p>
<p>But it’s more than that, of course. To pretend otherwise would be an insult to Jim’s devotion to him. From the very first time Jim kissed him in his suite on Yorktown, Leonard never doubted for an instant that Jim’s whole heart was his for the taking. They hadn’t gotten around to talking about marriage or anything so formal – maybe they never would have – but Leonard knew from day one that Jim was it for him, that the only thing he’d ever want for as long as he lived was the chance to fall asleep each night with Jim in his arms. And he knew, every time he felt those long legs twine around his as they lay together in the dark, that Jim felt the same.</p>
<p>It’s been a long time since he’s had that chance. He doesn’t know that he ever will again. But sometimes, when he’s stumped and distracted – when his mind wanders a little too far afield, his thoughts drifting out beyond his immediate awareness – he’ll suddenly jerk back to alertness with the bone-deep conviction that Jim was <i>just</i> there: that if he’d come back to his senses an instant earlier he would have found Jim crowded up against him where he sits in his hard-backed desk chair, Jim’s lean body cuddled warmly against his side, Jim’s fingers curled around his wrist, Jim’s tousled head a familiar weight on his shoulder.</p>
<p>Jim loved him, before. He loves him still – not with words or kisses or tender touches, but with broken seashells and honeysuckle vines, with corrupted audio files and the tremor of hope in his chest.</p>
<p>Leonard misses him so <i>fucking</i> much, every second of every minute of every lonely bled-together day. Maybe it’s not such a stretch to imagine that – wherever he is, whatever bigger picture he’s focused on – Jim might miss him a little, too.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>Leonard finally settles on Ptolemia as his next destination. It’s not somewhere he’s been before, but there’s a library there that’s renowned for its vast collection of ancient texts from across the galaxy. Maybe the answers he’s looking for are hiding in one of those tomes. And Jim did always talk about wanting to go someday. He’d go on about the walls crowded with musty old books in the same dreamy, wistful way other people might talk about vacationing on Risa or Piaj.</p>
<p>“You and your fossils,” Leonard mutters fondly. He enters the coordinates into the nav console. “Okay, kid. Ptolemia it is.”</p>
<p>While the AI gets busy plotting a course, Leonard drags himself over to the replicator for a cup of coffee. It’s late – or it <i>feels</i> late, anyway; he’s been so immersed in his research that he has no real sense of what the chronometer would say – and he could use a fresh hit of caffeine.</p>
<p>“Coffee, black, hot.” He rubs at his eyes, trying to massage away the headache growing just behind them. He hasn’t been taking the best care of himself since leaving Nibiru: eating sporadically, surviving mainly off coffee and willpower, and truthfully he can’t even remember the last time he slept or showered. It’s like living through his residency days all over again, only this time he doesn’t have the resiliency of youth to power him through it. Once upon a time he could roll right off his on-call bunk and into a resuscitative thoracotomy after a scant five minutes of shut-eye, emerge exhausted but physically unscathed from an accidental triple shift and feel right as rain after a good long sleep in his own bed, but the years have caught up to him with interest since then, and his body seems set on exacting revenge for its mistreatment past and present. Here he’s been doing nothing more taxing than sitting in a chair, and he feels like he’s been hit by a train, achy and stiff from spending so much time hunched over at his desk, his neck and shoulders knotted up with tension, his lower back in open revolt.</p>
<p>He’s too old for this shit. When this is all over, he’s going straight to Piaj for a month, at least. Or maybe Risa. A nice long stay someplace peaceful and warm, with real sunlight and a soft bed – that sounds like just what the proverbial doctor ordered. And he might have to make it an order, if –</p>
<p>But he’s getting ahead of himself. He’s got a long road ahead before he can even think of taking a break, much less imagine the company he may or may not have.</p>
<p>It occurs to him that he hasn’t heard anything from the replicator, which usually makes a muted hum while it’s working. He opens his eyes and is annoyed to see that the damn thing is still dark and silent, having evidently ignored his order. He checks inside, just in case, but there’s nothing there.</p>
<p>He scowls. Top-of-the-line technology, his ass.</p>
<p>“Coffee, black, hot,” he repeats firmly.</p>
<p>The replicator whirs away this time, blinks its little light a second later to let him know it’s got something ready for him, but when he opens it up, there’s no coffee to be found. Instead, he’s looking at a large mug of chamomile tea, pale gold and fragrant.</p>
<p>He tries to hide his smile, but it’s late (probably) and he’s tired and he fails pretty miserably. “You are the biggest pain in my ass, you know that?” He pulls out the mug and takes a cautious taste. It’s not terrible. It’d be better if it were coffee, but it’s not terrible.</p>
<p>For once, Jim’s intent is fairly unambiguous. Leonard glances at the time display and sees that it really is late – 0421 hours. That explains the headache.</p>
<p>“I thought time was arbitrary,” he says, because he can’t resist needling the kid, even as he raises his mug for another sip. “Hubris of man, beads on a string, all that jazz.”</p>
<p>The replicator whirs to life again, blinks at him when it’s done. Inside is a second cup of tea, this one giving off the unmistakable scent of valerian.</p>
<p>Leonard laughs out loud. “Okay, okay. You’ve made your point.”</p>
<p>He drinks his tea, both cups of it, and puts himself dutifully to bed. Ptolemia isn’t going anywhere. Jim wants him to rest, so he’ll rest.</p>
<p>As exhausted as he is, he doesn’t fall asleep right away – too much lingering caffeine in his system, probably. It does feel nice, though, to close his eyes and simply relax for a spell. His bunk is no more comfortable than it’s ever been, but there’s comfort enough to be found in the slow, hazy wash of memories he finds himself drifting through:</p>
<p>golden sunshine pouring in through tall windows, Jim’s bare thigh warm under his hand, Jim’s eyes gleaming in the light as he leans over for a lazy cream-and-sugar kiss</p>
<p>ceramic clunking against the nightstand, the jounce of the mattress, smooth skin and the soft glide of Cyclean wool, plush lips at his jaw murmuring teases and enticement, <i>you want this or are you planning to sleep the whole day away?</i></p>
<p>Jim’s hands on his shoulders, squeezing firm against the ache, <i>they’ll still be there in the morning</i>, Jim’s mouth so much sweeter than the last bitter dregs of cold coffee, Jim’s pleased sigh so much more urgent than the charts he’s abandoning</p>
<p>bed and heat and coffee and Jim, and Jim, and <i>Jim</i>…</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>“Coffee, black, hot,” he tells the replicator, hopeful that the contraption will actually cooperate now that he’s gotten some rest.</p>
<p>Those hopes are dashed when he opens the thing up to find yet another cup of tea.</p>
<p>He groans. “Jim, for crying out loud, I just want <i>one</i> lousy cup of fake coffee. Is that so much to – ”</p>
<p>He breaks off mid-complaint, because he’s suddenly registering the scent of the tea, and it’s not at all what he expected. He snatches the cup out of the replicator, nearly scalding his hand in the process, and holds it closer to the light to examine the steaming liquid inside, a bright coppery red flecked with tiny dark specks.</p>
<p>One painfully hot sip confirms his suspicion. It’s spice tea – <i>Vulcan</i> spice tea.</p>
<p>Leonard recognized that scent right away. Spock doesn’t much care for the stuff, but it seems to be popular among the older generations. The elders of the High Council must have gone through whole swimming pools of it while they were onboard the Enterprise after the destruction of Vulcan, during those long few weeks it took them to limp back to Earth from their final showdown with the Narada. Even now, all these years later, Leonard can’t smell it without thinking of drawn faces, haunted eyes, the commingled scent of incense smoke rising off dark robes.</p>
<p></p><div>
  <p>
  <i>“Mmm, what’s that?” Jim sniffs at the air like a hound dog catching a scent. “Smells good.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“Some kind of Vulcan chai, I think. T’Prell’s been bringing it for Sunok.” Leonard edges the scanner over a couple centimeters, scrutinizing the thyroid cartilage for signs of fracture. He had a look earlier, but with the extent of the damage he’s seeing to the strap muscles, he’s not taking any chances. “Dammit, Jim. You should’ve come to me sooner.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“I was kinda busy,” Jim says. “You know, saving Earth, rescuing Pike, destroying Nero’s ship – ”</i>
</p>
  <p><i>“Getting your windpipe crushed.” Leonard grimaces down at his tricorder. “Jesus. </i>Spock<i> did this?”</i></p>
  <p>
  <i>“Well, he had some help. Turns out Romulans love a good stranglehold too. Who knew?” Jim barks out a hoarse, tired laugh. “Must be that shared ancestry.”</i>
</p>
  <p><i>Oh, for the love of – “Are you telling me you got yourself choked out more than once on the </i>same day<i>?”</i></p>
  <p>
  <i>Jim frowns. “You make it sound like I was asking for it.” Leonard gives him a look, and after a brief standoff Jim responds with a tiny shrug, conceding the point. “Yeah, okay, I kinda was. The first time, anyway.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>Leonard moves the whirring scanner around to the side of Jim’s neck, assessing the contusions there. “What the hell got into you, saying that shit to him?” Jim’s mouth is always getting him into trouble, and sure, anyone would be pissed over getting dumped out on that ice ball, but Leonard was shocked by the nastiness that came out of him on the bridge. That kind of cruelty isn’t at all like the man he knows.</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“Would you believe me if I said he told me to?” Jim pauses. “Well, not him exactly. It was the other him, the older one. He was from the future – the same time Nero came from.” He studies Leonard’s face for a second. “That’s a ‘no’ on believing me, huh.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“That’s an ‘I believe you’ve hit your head a few too many times today,’” Leonard tells him. He trades the scanner for a regen, hovering the device as lightly as possible over the worst-damaged part of Jim’s throat.</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>Jim chuckles, humorless. “Yeah, I didn’t believe it either. Not until he showed me.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“Showed you what?”</i>
</p>
  <p><i>“Everything,” Jim says softly. Leonard glances up and sees that his eyes have gone distant, unfocused. “Us. Me and him, and you, all of us – everything we went through together. His whole life…” He blinks, his gaze sharpening. “It’s gone now, most of it. Like a dream. I couldn’t hang onto it all. It wasn’t…mine, to keep. But I </i>saw<i> it.”</i></p>
  <p>
  <i>Leonard eyes him with fresh concern, wondering if he shouldn’t give him another quick scan to check for TBI again. “The hell are you talking about, kid?”</i>
</p>
  <p><i>“Spock, the other one, he did this thing…” Jim raises a hand to touch his face, prodding at his temple, his scraped cheekbone. “He called it a…a meld, I think. A mind meld. Some Vulcan thing, I guess. And it’s like I was inside his head, like I was seeing everything though his eyes – everything he’d lived, everything he </i>was<i>. Everything he felt.” He drops his hand back down to his lap. “That’s how I knew he was – that the other Spock, our Spock, was emotionally compromised. I just had to get him to show it.”</i></p>
  <p>
  <i>Leonard snorts. “By getting your ass kicked?”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“I may have slightly underestimated him,” Jim admits. He winces as the regen grazes the darkest of the bruising on his neck. “That pointy-eared bastard’s got one hell of a grip.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“That pointy-eared bastard’s your first officer now, cowboy,” Leonard reminds him. “At least till we get back to Earth.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>Jim smiles faintly. “Yeah, he is. Guess I could do worse.” He falls quiet for a minute, letting the regen do its work. So quiet, in fact, that Leonard thinks he might be dozing off, and is reaching to brace his shoulder when he suddenly pipes up again. “Hey, Bones.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>Leonard goes ahead and grabs onto Jim’s shoulder anyway. If there’s one lesson he’s taken from the past couple days, it’s the value of keeping a good hold on the wily little shit, especially where medical treatment is concerned. “Yeah, Jim.”</i>
</p>
  <p><i>Jim smirks at him, eyes sparkling. “Three months before graduation. How’s </i>that<i> for a record.” Leonard rolls his eyes, and Jim grins outright. He reaches up and claps Leonard on the arm. “And who do I have to thank for it but my very own CMO? Good thing you got those certs, huh?”</i></p>
  <p>
  <i>“Oh, put a sock in it.” Leonard pushes on Jim’s shoulder, urging him down onto the humming biobed. “Come on, lie back. You’re gonna be here a while – might as well get comfortable.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“Comfortable? On this thing?” Jim squirms theatrically, eliciting a chirp of concern from the bed’s sensors. “You sure you didn’t bring me to the brig by mistake?”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“Who said anything about a mistake,” Leonard says. “Now pipe down, would you? Before I decide to take a turn at strangling you myself.”</i>
</p>
</div><p>Son of a bitch.</p>
<p>Leonard sets the teacup down with a clatter and hurries over to the cockpit. He’s not supposed to be heading for Ptolemia at all. No, his next port of call is much farther away – and yet, at the same time, much closer to home.</p>
<p>“Computer,” he says, “give me everything you’ve got on Vulcan telepathy.”</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>“I know it sounds crazy – ”</p>
<p>“I do not believe that you are mentally ill, Leonard,” Spock says, his voice sounding even flatter than usual over the line. “Your logic is flawed, but I am able to follow your line of reasoning. I merely disagree with your conclusions.”</p>
<p>There’s some irony in the fact that Leonard’s search for answers has led him back to Spock. In explaining how he came to realize what Jim is asking of him, he’s judiciously glossed over the exact details of his most recent experiences. What was he supposed to say? <i>Hey, Spock, remember what an asshole you used to be? Because Jim sure does.</i> Not a great opener, especially considering that he’s come hat in hand to ask for Spock’s help.</p>
<p>On screen, Spock leans back in his seat and steeples his fingers, settling in for what he probably figures will be a slam-dunk closing argument. Well, joke’s on him – Leonard’s in this game to win it, and he’s not backing down no matter what Spock says next. “While I acknowledge that your findings are correct to a point, I must caution you against unsubstantiated extrapolation. It is true that there have been, in exceptional cases, instances in which an individual’s katra has been transferred into an object for preservation. Furthermore, I am certain that Jim was aware of this, as he questioned me about katric transference on two separate occasions. It is my belief that he saw something in Ambassador Spock’s memories which prompted his curiosity on the matter, though he would neither confirm this nor divulge the details to me.” He holds up a hand to stay Leonard’s triumphant interruption. “However, the incontestable fact remains that Jim was human. Unassisted transfers are exceedingly rare even among Vulcans. While all Vulcans possess a measure of innate psionic ability, most would not be sufficiently skilled or practiced to conduct a successful transfer of their own katra without the support of an experienced priest. How far more insurmountable a task would this be for a man lacking such psionic capacity? You must be aware that there has never been a verified instance of a human independently passing any part of their living spirit beyond the boundaries of their own physical body.”</p>
<p>“There’s never been a human like Jim Kirk,” Leonard says fiercely.</p>
<p>Spock’s expression softens, just a little. “No,” he agrees. “There has not.”</p>
<p>He’s starting to waver, Leonard can tell. He <i>wants</i> to believe, of course he does, but he’s caught between the two sides of himself: the skeptical Vulcan scientist demanding hard facts and probabilities, and the man who loved Jim with all-too-human irrational loyalty. Leonard just has to figure out how to get him the rest of the way there, to knock away the blinders of all his damn logic and help him <i>feel</i> the truth of what Leonard’s telling him.</p>
<p>“Look, if it were anyone else, I’d agree with you, but this is Jim we’re talking about. You were his first officer for seven years. In all those years, how many times did you tell him something couldn’t be done, only to have him make a liar out of you?”</p>
<p>“An error in judgment does not equate to a lie,” Spock says – and then, before Leonard can figure out how to reach through the screen and strangle him, he continues, “but I acknowledge the core of the point I believe you are attempting to communicate. On multiple occasions as captain of the Enterprise, Jim was able to accomplish that which I had calculated to be essentially unachievable. It was arguably his modus operandi.”</p>
<p>“It was,” Leonard says. “It <i>is</i>. I don’t know about you, but me, I’ve eaten enough goddamn crow to last a lifetime. I’m not putting a damn thing past that man. If anyone in the whole history of the human race is gonna work out the secret to cheating death, you can bet your ass it’d be Jim.” Spock doesn’t contest the point, and Leonard presses on, going in for the kill. “Come on, Spock. Who knows better than you and me what he’s capable of? We brought him back once before, didn’t we? Everyone told us it couldn’t be done, but we did it. <i>Jim</i> did it. Is it so crazy to think he could do it again?”</p>
<p>Spock is shaking his head, but in the way that means he’s still thinking, not flat-out rejecting. “The odds of him accomplishing such a thing independently, with no prior teaching or mental conditioning and no assistance from a Vulcan intermediary, are so vanishingly small as to not merit calculation.”</p>
<p>“But they’re not zero,” Leonard says, seizing on Spock’s choice of words. “You’re not saying it’s impossible.”</p>
<p>Spock’s mouth quirks almost imperceptibly up at the side. “As you have so astutely reminded me, the concept is incongruent with my experiential knowledge of Jim Kirk.”</p>
<p>Leonard grins, flush with victory. “You’re damn right it is.”</p>
<p>Spock’s almost-smile fades as quickly as it came. “I am willing to offer what assistance I can, but I fear it will be some time before we are able to meet in person. The Enterprise has received orders to map the Ordew Nebula in the Serolki system. It will most likely be several months before our work here has concluded.”</p>
<p>He goes silent for a long minute, gazing off at some point to the left of the screen. He’s still not saying <i>no</i>, not saying <i>impossible</i>, so Leonard keeps quiet, letting him think.</p>
<p>“New Vulcan is not far from your current location,” Spock says finally, meeting Leonard’s eyes again. “My father is a highly attuned and skillful telepath. If Jim did indeed manage to transfer any fragment of his spirit into one of the objects in your possession, my father would be able to detect it. I will request his assistance in this matter.” He raises a meaningful eyebrow. “It will require considerable effort to persuade him. I will endeavor to translate your reasoning into terms he will find more compelling.”</p>
<p>“Thank you,” Leonard says, almost dizzy with relief. The pull is back, stronger than ever. He slips his hand into his pocket to touch the seashell pieces, running a fingertip along one half’s cracked edge.</p>
<p>“I will contact my father immediately and inform you of his decision.” Surprisingly, Spock allows himself another (kinda, sorta, maybe if you squint) smile. He must be feeling positively giddy. “Your message came as a gratifying surprise, Doctor. I am relieved to find your spirits much improved from the last time we spoke.”</p>
<p>“Yeah. I’m sorry for the whole…” Leonard gestures vaguely, hoping it’ll be enough to get across <i>dropping off the grid and ignoring all your attempts at communication for however long it’s been since I left</i>.</p>
<p>“I neither expect nor desire an apology,” Spock says. “I merely wish to communicate my gladness at seeing you so well.”</p>
<p>Leonard traces again over the sharp edge of the shell piece. “I’m getting there. Thanks again, Spock. Take care of yourself.”</p>
<p>“Leonard,” Spock says, halting him in his tracks as he’s about to end the call. He’s leaned forward, gazing intently at Leonard through the feed with an expression Leonard’s not sure how to classify. “You truly believe that Jim’s spirit is still with you in some fashion.”</p>
<p><i>Believe</i> is the wrong word for it, but he’s not about to argue semantics now, not with so much hanging in the balance. “Yeah, Spock. I do.”</p>
<p>Spock sits back in his chair, looking contemplative. “Fascinating,” he murmurs.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>Leonard doesn’t have to wait long before he receives the promised follow-up message from Spock. Sarek has agreed to meet with him, and he requests that Leonard meet him at his home on New Vulcan at his earliest convenience.</p>
<p>Leonard feeds the coordinates Spock’s provided into the nav console and watches as the plotted course begins to sketch out across the mapping screen. “All right, kid. Here goes. Off to the galaxy’s ice-cold heart of logic and rationality.” He huffs in disbelief at himself and turns to go see if he can’t convince the replicator to serve him a stiff drink or three. “Begging favors from Vulcans. God help me.”</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>“I would advise you to drink plentifully,” Sarek says as he sets down a water jug and tumbler on Leonard’s side of the desk. “You have not had adequate time to acclimate to this planet’s weather conditions, and humans are highly susceptible to dehydration in our climate if they do not increase their consumption of liquid. Unless you would prefer tea?”</p>
<p>Leonard shakes his head, already reaching for the jug to pour himself a glass. “Water’s great, thank you. To be honest, I don’t know how anyone can stand to drink tea in this heat.” It’s not actually as bad as he would have expected – the environmental control system is humming away, and Sarek must have turned down the temperature for Leonard’s sake, to the point where the study is almost chilly – but the arid desert air has already parched his mouth and throat, and he eagerly drinks down half the glass of water in a single go.</p>
<p>“Ingesting hot beverages is an effective method for reducing body heat in low-humidity environments,” Sarek says, rounding to the other side of the desk and lowering himself gracefully into his own chair. “The elevated rate of perspiration results in a quantifiable cooling effect if such perspiration is efficiently evaporated, as would be the case under present conditions.”</p>
<p>Oh, lordy. Leonard can already tell this is going to be a long visit.</p>
<p>“I’m pretty familiar with the physiological side of things, sir,” he says as politely as he can manage. “But some things are more about perception than reality. I’m sure that sounds illogical to you, but, hey, what can I say – we humans are an illogical bunch.”</p>
<p>“It was not my intention to cause offense, Doctor. I trust that, as a physician, you are sufficiently capable of assessing your own hydration requirements.” Sarek leans forward slightly, urging his long sleeves back with an elegant twist of the wrists before folding his hands together on the desk. “Let us turn to the reason for your visit. Spock tells me that you believe your late captain’s katra to be contained within a particular object in your possession.”</p>
<p>“Yes, sir.”</p>
<p>“He also tells me,” Sarek continues, that cool Vulcan poker face giving nothing away about his own feelings on the matter, “that he has communicated to you the implausibility of your hypothesis, given Kirk’s lack of mental training and the difficulty of achieving such a transfer without the support of a priest.”</p>
<p>Leonard squares his shoulders, steeling himself for the coming debate. “Yes, sir. But – ”</p>
<p>To Leonard’s surprise, Sarek waves him off with a dismissive gesture. “There is no need for you to argue your case, Dr. McCoy. I have told my son that I will investigate this matter regardless of its illogical premise. May I see the object in question?”</p>
<p>Damn. Spock must have gone all in with his pa on this one. Leonard will have to send him a fruit basket or something.</p>
<p>“Well, there are a few possibilities.” Leonard reaches into the box at his feet and pulls out Jim’s log recorder, which he places gingerly on the desk between them. “But if I had to guess, I’d say it’s this.”</p>
<p>To his credit, Sarek is careful in his handling of the recorder – as careful as if he really did believe it holds what Leonard’s suggesting it does.  He nudges it closer to himself, then lays his hands over it, gazing down contemplatively at the device.</p>
<p>Leonard looks at it too – stares at it, more like, afraid to even blink as he waits for the verdict. Can Sarek feel Jim yet? What will it feel like from his perspective, not knowing Jim like Leonard does? And if he does feel him, <i>find</i> him, where the hell do they even start when it comes to the question of bringing him back?</p>
<p>“I cannot detect a spiritual presence,” Sarek says quietly. He closes his eyes, brow tightening in concentration, and finally reopens them and gives a very slight shake of his head. “There is nothing here, Doctor.”</p>
<p>Disappointment curdles cold in Leonard’s gut. He really thought it was the recorder. Still, there’s no reason to lose hope yet. “What about these?” he prompts, pulling the seashell fragments from his pocket and reaching over to set them on the desk beside the recorder.</p>
<p>Sarek cups his hands over the pieces and shuts his eyes again. His lips part after a few seconds, as if he’s going to speak, but just as Leonard’s getting his hopes up, he shakes his head once more. “Nor here.”</p>
<p>Leonard digs back into the box, hunting for his next best bet. The PADD, maybe? The passcode that would only mean anything to the two of them, the photo Leonard doesn’t recall being taken, the catch he feels in his chest every time he looks at Jim’s laughing face and remembers how it felt to have him so close and loose and comfortable – yes, the PADD could be it.</p>
<p>But it’s not.</p>
<p>Neither is the vine, or the chess piece, or the salve, or the bedraggled shirt. Sarek takes each item Leonard offers up, rests his hands on or around them and works whatever mysterious Vulcan magic he’s bringing into play, and each time he shakes his head, <i>no</i>. </p>
<p>“Could he be – I don’t know, split up or something? Divided between all of them?” Leonard’s aware that he’s beginning to sound desperate, crazy even, but Sarek has gone over all Jim’s gifts now and hasn’t turned up a damn thing. There’s got to be some other explanation. Jim is here – he <i>has</i> to be. Leonard just has to riddle out how to find him.</p>
<p>“It is unlikely,” Sarek says. “Even if that were the case, I would still be able to detect traces of his spirit, however faint.” He eyes Leonard with an expression that could almost be interpreted as sympathetic, which is salt into the goddamn wound. Inspiring pity from Vulcans – is there any lower Leonard could possibly fall? “I regret that I am unable to provide you with the answer for which you hoped, Doctor.”</p>
<p>Leonard hunches over in his seat, elbows on his knees, head in his hands. <i>Think, McCoy, think – </i> “I just don’t understand it. I know you’ve got no reason to believe me, but I swear to you, swear on my mama’s grave and my daddy’s too – he’s changed things, things there’s no logical explanation for. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, felt it with my own two hands. That vine, the recording, the business with the replicator – these coordinates that keep popping up out of nowhere – ” He shuts his eyes, presses the heels of his hands against them as he thinks back through it all. “I mean, we went to Nibiru, and he – he was <i>there</i>, on the ship and…all around. I felt it clear as day.” He sits bolt upright, shocked through with a sudden frisson of hope. “The ship! Could he – ”</p>
<p>But Sarek is shaking his head again. “Spock suggested this theory when we spoke, so I discreetly examined your ship upon your arrival. There is no more sign of katric presence there than in any of these items.”</p>
<p>Leonard slumps back down, his heart sinking to somewhere around his toes. “It doesn’t make sense. I’m telling you, it’s not all in my imagination. It <i>can’t</i> be. Not with the things he’s done.”</p>
<p>Sarek observes him from across the wide desk, its surface cluttered now with all of Jim’s gifts. “There is one further possibility, Doctor.”</p>
<p>Leonard perks up around another flare of hope, though it dims somewhat as he waits in vain for Sarek to elaborate. “Which is?” he prompts when no further explanation seems forthcoming.</p>
<p>“I do not wish to raise your hopes,” Sarek says, sidestepping the question. “The probability of what I am proposing is infinitesimally small, far less than even your original hypothesis, which we may now consider soundly disproven.”</p>
<p>Leonard grits his teeth so hard he may well be swallowing bits of molar with his next sip of water. “So why bring it up at all?”</p>
<p>Sarek sits there in tight-lipped silence for long enough that Leonard starts to worry he’s pissed him off and is about to get booted out on his ass. When he finally does speak, though, his voice isn’t anywhere near as severe as Leonard expects. “I know what it is to grieve a lost companion,” he says, his impassive expression wavering to reveal a hint of something that bears a startling resemblance to real emotion. “Mine would have been displeased with me if I failed to explore every possibility on your behalf, no matter how improbable.”</p>
<p>Well, now Leonard feels like a true asshole. “I’m sorry, sir,” he says – for his impatience, and for Sarek’s loss. Cold old bastard that he may be with everyone else, including his own son, Leonard knows the man genuinely loved Spock’s ma. It’s about the only unqualified positive thing he’s ever heard either Spock or Uhura say to his credit. “I’m just…”</p>
<p>“You are not obligated to explain your motivations. As I said, I have some measure of insight into your current mental state.” Sarek returns his gaze to the objects on his desk, his hand moving to hover once more over the recorder. He speaks slowly, like he’s weighing each word before doling it out, assessing it for logical shortcomings: “Since ancient times, the most common practice for katric preservation has been to utilize an ark designed for that purpose. However, there have been rare instances in which a person’s katra has been transferred temporarily into the living body of another. These transferences are unstable and are to be avoided when possible, but the technique is occasionally necessary in exigent circumstances. I myself served as a carrier for the katra of Surak to preserve it from destruction when – ”</p>
<p>“Hang on,” Leonard interrupts, unable to wait placidly for Sarek to wind his way to the punchline when he feels like he’s just been kicked in the chest by a Clydesdale. “Are you telling me that Jim is – that he could be – ”</p>
<p>“It is within the theoretical realm of possibility,” Sarek says, infuriatingly noncommittal. “There has been one recorded case of a human unknowingly receiving and carrying a Vulcan katra, though I must reiterate that there is no historical precedent for the transference of the human equivalent.”</p>
<p>“How – how would I know?” Leonard struggles to get the words out. His heart is racing a lightyear a minute, hammering so hard and fast it feels like it might just beat its way right out of his chest. Could it really be true? Is <i>this</i> what Jim’s been trying to tell him?</p>
<p>Sarek meets Leonard’s eyes again. “Katric coexistence is discernible through a process known as melding.”</p>
<p>
  <i>He called it a meld.</i>
</p>
<p>Leonard can hardly breathe. All this time, he’s felt that Jim is tied to him. Maybe he is. Maybe he’s been holding even tighter than Leonard realized.</p>
<p>It would explain so much: his sense of being caught up in one of Jim’s schemes; the indescribable <i>awareness</i> he feels sometimes, that skin-prickling sensation like Jim is right there with him; the reason he’s followed Jim’s whims at every turn, going where Jim wanted to go, doing what Jim wanted him to do, even before he had the faintest inkling of Jim’s influence.</p>
<p>Because he did, didn’t he? It’s the damnedest thing, but thinking back, he doesn’t actually remember making the decision to go to Piaj. Why the hell would he have? Why, lost and directionless in the all-consuming freshness of his grief, would he have chosen to revisit their cottage there – gone so far out of his way to immerse himself in the torturing sweetness of those memories – when he could barely bring himself to step foot in their quarters on the Enterprise before he left?</p>
<p>And on Yorktown – how <i>did</i> he guess the passcode to Jim’s PADD? Shit, even before that – did Paris really assign him to Jim’s quarters? He’d have sworn she did, but he can’t recall her telling him the suite number, just that she’d made arrangements for him in the officers’ tower. What he does remember is the shock of seeing that familiar number on the doorplate – like it was only in that moment that he realized which suite he’d be in. What kind of sense does that make, to have made it all the way to the threshold of his assigned quarters before learning what they were?</p>
<p>There have been so many bizarre coincidences since he left the Enterprise, so many of his own actions he can’t quite trace back to a logical starting point. Sure, some things have stood out enough to throw him, to make him wonder, but for the most part he’s just accepted events as they unfold around him, rarely stopping to analyze the how or why of it all.</p>
<p>The <i>why</i> is Jim, of course. It always has been. And now he might just get an answer to the <i>how</i>.</p>
<p>“How does it work?” he asks, thrumming with the anticipation of what this could mean. “The meld. What do I do?”</p>
<p>“The matter is not so simple,” Sarek says. “You must understand, melding is not without considerable risk, particularly for a human. The disruption of neuroelectric impulses can lead to – ”</p>
<p>“I don’t <i>care</i>,” Leonard growls. He doesn’t give a rat’s ass what the side effects might be. If there’s even the slightest chance that he’s got Jim’s goddamn <i>soul</i> inside him, he wants to fucking know about it.</p>
<p>Sarek studies him for another moment before nodding. “Then we shall proceed.” He gestures toward a streamlined chaise against the nearby wall. “I suggest that you assume a reclined position. You will likely experience a sensation of disconnect between your physical and mental states during the process.”</p>
<p>Leonard dashes over to the chaise and settles himself down on it, hurriedly wriggling into position while Sarek follows at a more sedate pace, seemingly content to take his good sweet time mulling over the possibility that he’s about to discover the first ever recorded instance of human spiritual transference.</p>
<p>“You are certain that you wish to engage in this process despite the risks,” he says, as if there’s any chance in hell Leonard’s going to suddenly change his mind.</p>
<p>“Yes,” Leonard says, in a tone that maybe makes it sound a little more like <i>are you fucking kidding me</i>. “I’m sure. I’ll sign a thousand consents, if you want, just – please. Please. I have to know.”</p>
<p>“That will not be necessary.” Sarek leans over Leonard slightly and places a hand on either side of his face, pressing his fingertips into Leonard’s temples, his chin, beneath each eye. “I will commence the meld now, if this is agreeable to you.”</p>
<p>Leonard nods and closes his eyes. He’s not sure he needs to, but the position is intimate in a way he’s not entirely comfortable with, and he’d rather not be staring Spock’s pa in the face the whole time he’s digging around inside his head.</p>
<p>“My mind to your mind,” he hears Sarek say. “Our minds, one and together.”</p>
<p>And then – </p>
<p>The lights are low, a feeble 10 percent, and Jim’s fingers are running through his hair, Jim’s lips warm and dry against his cheek, his jaw, the ticklish spot beneath his chin. He opens his eyes to see Jim grinning, so close, and he pushes him away, doesn’t kiss him goodbye, doesn’t watch him leave, he’ll see him later –</p>
<p>“We lost him.” Sarek’s voice sounds like it’s coming from far, far away. Low and distorted, like something heard from deep underwater. “Our guiding light. The brightest in the universe. We failed him, and now he is gone. Alone in the dark with only the company of strangers’ bones.”</p>
<p>He’s back on Piaj, the cold breeze chasing him inside their little white cottage, floorboards creaking underfoot. The bed is neatly made, the counters wiped clean, everything in its place, and there’s a flash of color hiding in the snow-white sand, the iridescent gleam of a broken seashell.</p>
<p>“And yet…we sense him, still.”</p>
<p>He’s in Admiral Paris’s glass-walled office – no, he’s in the officers’ tower, a box cradled against his chest, <i>1248</i> staring up at him from a glossy doorplate. There’s a tube of salve in his hand – a silver-edged black king – Jim’s laughing face frozen forever beneath the pad of his finger.</p>
<p>“Our sweet stubborn man. We <i>feel</i> him.”</p>
<p>He’s on the floor of his ship, goosebumps prickling up his arms – <i>Bones?</i> – and the log recorder is warm in his hands, warm and impossible, just like Jim.</p>
<p>“We are not alone.”</p>
<p>He’s looking down at a pre-plotted course through the void, antsy, needing the stink blown off him, and amidst the stars he notices a name he hasn’t thought of in a long, long time.</p>
<p>“But what is it he wants from us? What does he…”</p>
<p>Faster now, flipping through places and sights and thoughts like the pages of an old paper book. The clatter of wooden doll limbs. A tendril of green coiled around his ankle. <i>00:00:24</i>. The angry hiss of corrupted audio. <i>Please, please,</i> in his chest like a second heartbeat, softer than it was, making him quake. A bouquet of yellow zinnias. An orange, round and unblemished, perfect in every way. The frozen black sea slanting and uneven beneath his boots, rippling out in every direction. Hope breaking open deep in his chest, twining its roots around his bones, creating space for itself where before there was nothing at all.</p>
<p>“I’m not giving up on you,” Sarek says, but it’s not really him, it’s the meld talking, <i>our minds, one and together.</i> “Stay with me. <i>Please.</i>”</p>
<p>Sarek’s hands fall away from Leonard’s face.</p>
<p>Leonard is slow to open his eyes, dazed and disoriented from the meld. When he finally manages it, he finds that Sarek is staring down at him with those eyes that are so much like Spock’s and yet so different.</p>
<p>“Sir?” Leonard wets his lips. His mouth is dry, cottony, though the meld couldn’t have lasted more than a few minutes.</p>
<p>“You are not carrying his katra.” Sarek turns on his heel, striding back toward his desk with a hustle Leonard’s never seen from him before – like there are hounds nipping at his heels, like he can’t even stand to be <i>near</i> Leonard after what he’s just seen in his uncivilized human mind. “James Kirk does not live within you.”</p>
<p>“But he’s here,” Leonard says. He pushes himself up to a sitting position with a tingly-numb arm, fighting off a rush of lightheadedness. He feels exhausted, <i>heavy</i>, as if he’s been lying there for hours. “You said you felt him, you said – ”</p>
<p>“No.” Sarek pauses in front of his desk, still angled away from Leonard. “All that I have felt is…a mirage. A mere reflection of your memories and emotions, refracted and illusory. It is no more real than the impossible promise of water shimmering on the distant sand.” He casts a glance over his shoulder in Leonard’s direction, not quite making eye contact. “He was, Dr. McCoy. And perhaps he is. But not here.”</p>
<p>“What –  what does that even – ” Leonard shakes his head, trying to gather his wits. He’s awash in a mess of images and feelings, and the lure of those memories is making it hard to concentrate on the here and now. “Look, can you just help me figure out what I’m supposed to do? What he wants?”</p>
<p>“You know this already, Doctor,” Sarek replies, which is sure news to Leonard. “If we are to accept the premise that he is, and further accept your blind instinctual conviction that he remains essentially unchanged from the man you loved in this life, then the only logical answer to your question is that he wants you above all else – as he did before, as you believed he always would.” He extends a hand toward the desk, grazing his fingers over the objects scattered there: the recorder, the chess piece, the withered vine. “He wants only you.”</p>
<p>“But he has me,” Leonard says, too muddled up still to be embarrassed by such a shameless display of naked sentiment in front of a Vulcan. “He’s – I’m his, he <i>has</i> me. He’s got to know that.”</p>
<p>“Yes,” Sarek says quietly. “So it would seem.”</p>
<p>He moves past the desk, toward the long window spanning the outside wall. Leonard caught a glimpse of the view from that window when he first arrived: a rippling landscape of rust-colored sand and rock beneath a ruddy sky, uninterrupted by the other soaring towers of the colony. <i>Adequate</i> by Vulcan standards, he’d imagine. It certainly looks plenty similar to their original world, at least based on the images he’s seen. Almost eerily similar, in fact. He has to wonder if that’s more of a comfort or a torment for them.</p>
<p>“You have the information for which you came,” Sarek says. From this angle he’s nothing but a slim dark silhouette, backlit by the gleam of the light outside. “There is nothing to be gained by your continued presence here.”</p>
<p>That’s a lot of words to say <i>get out</i>, and not a whole lot politer, in Leonard’s opinion. He gets to his feet, gripping the back of the chaise as another wave of shivery dizziness washes over him. “Guess I’ll be going, then.” He scrubs his hands over his face, struggling to shake off the woozy haze that’s been fogging his senses since Sarek ended the meld. “I don’t suppose you could give me a clue as to where I’m headed.”</p>
<p>Sarek doesn’t respond.</p>
<p>“Right,” Leonard says with a sigh. “Well, uh...thank you, sir. I appreciate your help.” If you can even call it that.</p>
<p>He stumbles back to the desk and gathers up the things he brought so he can pack them up again. They may not have Jim’s spirit inside them, but they’re his all the same, little treasures unearthed from the places they’ve been and tipped into Leonard’s hand. Priceless.</p>
<p>The recorder is the last item to be stowed away. Leonard holds it in both hands for a moment, remembering that night on his ship – the strange heat of the device bleeding into his skin, the small comfort of its warmth in the cold and dark.</p>
<p><i>Love you too</i>, he mouths soundlessly, and drops a quick kiss to the screen before tucking it away with the rest of Jim’s gifts. </p>
<p>Fuck katras and mind melds and all that other mystical hocus-pocus, anyway. He knows his own heart, a hell of a lot better than any uptight Vulcan ever could. He can feel that Jim is with him, clinging to him, wound tight around his very bones. He doesn’t need Sarek or anyone else to tell him that.</p>
<p>He’s at the door, reaching for the ornately molded handle, when he hears from behind him: “Something is wrong.”</p>
<p>Leonard looks back to where Sarek is still standing motionless by the window. “Sir?” he says, confused.</p>
<p>Sarek turns to face him, his arms folded, hands tucked out of sight within his flowing sleeves. “You are an intelligent man, Leonard McCoy. Immoderate even for a human, reckless and ungoverned in your passions, but perceptive, highly educated by Earth standards, diligent and methodical in matters concerning your profession. In spite of your emotional intemperance, you are fully capable of sound reasoning.”</p>
<p>Leonard stares, not sure whether to be more gobsmacked by Sarek’s gall or by the sheer intricacy of his contempt. Damned if this asshole didn’t just insult him four times in the same breath, and all under the guise of a compliment so backhanded he could’ve sprained something. Spock will be sorely disappointed to hear his record’s been broken.</p>
<p>Sarek glides a few slow steps toward Leonard, approaching him at a pace so measured it hardly rustles his robe. “You are dissatisfied with my counsel. You feel that I have offered you little, that you leave knowing nothing you did not know upon your arrival. In this, we stand in agreement.”</p>
<p>Leonard can feel his eyebrows climbing toward his hairline. “No kidding.”</p>
<p>“You came here seeking answers, but there is nothing I can tell you which you do not already know.” Sarek is getting closer now, and Leonard finds himself taking an instinctive step away, momentarily startled by the thunk of hard wood at his back. “Undisciplined as your thought processes may be, still the threads of logical inference may be found amidst the chaos. It is not for lack of rational ability that you find yourself struggling to comprehend your current predicament. It is <i>fear</i> which holds you back from acknowledging your awareness that none of this is truly as it appears – fear, and hope, two sides of the same self-deluding coin. The pieces of your puzzle do not fit neatly into the logical whole you long for, and yet you pursue your misguided quest with the stubbornness of a <i>ch'kariya</i> which refuses to release the bait holding it fast in its trap.” </p>
<p>“What does that even mean?” Leonard’s done with politeness. The hairs are standing up along the back of his neck, and he has just fucking <i>had it</i> with all this convoluted ambiguous horseshit. “For God’s sake, just – talk in a goddamn straight line, would you? What’s your <i>point</i>?”</p>
<p>“The point, Doctor,” Sarek says, and he’s close now, too close, “is that you are chasing the mirage. You must recognize it for what it is or risk losing yourself to its pursuit, unable to find your way back across the shifting sands.” His sharp black eyes are fixed on Leonard like he can see right through him, as if even now he could go rifling through the vulnerable inner workings of Leonard’s mind, pawing carelessly through his most treasured memories. “Let go of the bait, Leonard. It is not yet too late. You can still set yourself free.”</p>
<p>“I don’t want to be free,” Leonard snaps – unnerved by Sarek’s sudden intensity, hackling up like a cornered dog, but sure of this, at least. “I want <i>Jim</i>.”</p>
<p>Sarek holds his gaze for a long moment, cool, assessing. “Very well,” he says at last, and falls back a step, putting just enough distance between them that Leonard feels like he can start to breathe again. “Humans are, as you say, an ‘illogical bunch,’ ruled by emotion over reason. It appears you shall have to learn the truth in your own way.”</p>
<p>Leonard watches in disbelief while Sarek strolls away, leisurely retracing his path across the study as if he weren’t hissing riddles in Leonard’s face a second ago. <i>Jesus.</i> That was some real Jekyll and Hyde shit. Who’d have thought the old man had it in him?</p>
<p>“Go, then,” Sarek says as he reclaims his position by the window. “If you will not be swayed from your path, you must follow it to its end.”</p>
<p>Leonard peels himself away from the door, a touch embarrassed now by how easily he let himself get rattled. “And where’s that?”</p>
<p>Sarek hums, short and judgy, like the question is so stupid he’s aggrieved at having been asked. “Home, of course. Is that not where every path leads, in time?”</p>
<p>Leonard is almost surprised, after all the blows he’s been dealt since arriving here, that he still has enough left in him to feel the pain of that suggestion. “That’s a real nice sentiment, but I don’t have a home to go to. I’ve got nothing left. It’s just me.”</p>
<p>Once again, Sarek keeps him waiting on a response. Either he's really that careful about choosing his words, or he likes to give the impression he is - or maybe it's neither, because what he ends up saying has sweet fuck-all to do with anything: “It is unfortunate that you have abandoned your recent attempts at meditation. There is great value in learning to fully inhabit the present moment.”</p>
<p>It’s probably for the best that Sarek has his back turned, as Leonard can’t imagine whatever expression is on his face right now would help him curry any favor. “I’ll have to take your word for it.”</p>
<p>“It is hardly a matter of opinion, Doctor. Logically speaking, the present is all we have.” Sarek lets out a sound that might possibly be some distant Vulcan cousin of a sigh. “You will recall that the day we first met, I witnessed the end of my world. A planet which had existed for billions of years, which gave birth to one of the greatest civilizations in this galaxy, billions of katras, cultures and ecosystems the universe had never seen before and never will again – all swallowed into nothingness. Vanished in the blink of an eye.”</p>
<p>Leonard doesn’t know what to say to that. He doesn’t know that there’s anything <i>to</i> say – that there are enough words in any language to do justice to the scale of what Sarek has lost. His own pain seems small and petty in comparison.</p>
<p>“My wife made us a pleasant home on that planet for many years,” Sarek says. “She, and it, are no more. They exist only in the past, gone from me now as the heat of each day is gone from the night which follows, and a future which might have been mine will never come to pass.” He nods toward the window. “And so this is my home, for today. Perhaps it will remain so tomorrow; perhaps not. But in this moment, it is. In this moment, I am.”</p>
<p>He falls silent. Outside the window, the sun is beginning to set, sinking slowly toward the horizon of the world known as New Vulcan. Home, or something like it, for the lonely survivors of a tragedy beyond comprehension.</p>
<p>“Sir?” Leonard says tentatively, when enough time has passed that it’s become apparent Sarek has no intention of saying anything more.</p>
<p>“Go home, Leonard,” Sarek says, not looking away from the window. “You have wandered long enough. It is time for you to go home.”</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>“Fucking <i>Vulcans</i>,” Leonard grumbles to himself as he drops into the pilot’s seat to initiate the lift-off sequence. Fat lot of good it did him coming here. He’s leaving with more questions than answers, tied in knots over all Sarek’s damn riddles.</p>
<p>These goddamn people. All their big talk about logic and precision, and when it really matters, not one of them can give you a straight answer.</p>
<p>The ship spins to the left as it rises, giving him a good view of the tower in which Sarek lives, and Leonard only just barely resists the urge to give it the finger. Instead, he keeps glaring out the viewscreen, savoring the petty pleasure of watching the colony shrink down into a scattering of distant gleaming pinpricks clustered in one corner of a vast red sandbox.</p>
<p>They break atmosphere a minute later, leaving New Vulcan and all its infernal mind games behind for good, and Leonard thunks his head back against the rest with a frustrated groan.</p>
<p>Now what?</p>
<p>Back to the drawing board, he guesses. Maybe he’ll go to Ptolemia after all, or maybe he should start heading out to the Serolki system to meet up with the Enterprise. Spock <i>knows</i> Jim, understands him like Sarek never could. He might be able to scrape together a more helpful interpretation of whatever’s rattling around inside Leonard’s head, or at least help him work out where to go from here.</p>
<p>But, no – he won’t go to Spock. Not yet, anyway. He can’t stand the thought of dealing with another Vulcan right now, struggling to translate his bone-deep <i>feeling</i> of Jim into words and bloodless logic.</p>
<p>Maybe that’s where the meld went wrong. After all, Sarek did get one thing right: as far as Jim’s concerned, Leonard never has listened to reason, up to and including his own. If he had, he wouldn’t have ever snuck the kid onto the Enterprise in the first place, and who knows where they’d all be now. When it comes to Jim, Leonard’s always followed his heart, not his head. He ought to know better than to try swapping horses in <a href="https://youtu.be/y0QNVSEIIJo">midstream</a>.</p>
<p>The Yorktown box is sitting open by his feet, too full now to close completely, packed with messages Leonard’s still not sure he knows how to interpret correctly. The recorder is on top, and Leonard touches it gently, affectionately, stroking its smooth surface with his fingertips. It may not contain Jim’s soul the way the Vulcans think of it, but it’s a link to him regardless. He felt Jim with him that night, sensed him out there in the darkness. It was his head that led him astray afterward, muddying the waters with all kinds of doubts and questions and self-satisfied assurances about the way the world worked. What was it he told himself then? <i>The human brain’s not half as smart as it thinks it is.</i> He really should’ve followed that line of reasoning to its natural conclusion and saved himself a whole heap of hand-wringing.</p>
<p>Leonard’s fingers graze the top of the chess piece, the small blunt corners of the cross denoting its status. He eases it out from the other items and holds it in his palm, wondering for the hundredth time about whether or not Jim had a hand in making sure it got back to him.</p>
<p>He likes to think he did. That it has a meaning of its own, not so different from the seashell pieces: something loved and lost, finding its way home at long last.</p>
<p>He hopes Spock and Uhura kept the rest of the set. Maybe one day, if he’s very, very lucky, they’ll all get the chance to play together again.</p>
<p>Jim and Spock could play, anyway. Uhura prefers Bao or card games, and Leonard will happily let her wipe the floor with him a hundred times over before he’ll sit through a single match of any strategy game against Spock, much less chess. It’s like playing against a damn supercomputer, the odds impossibly stacked against him, and he can’t abide Spock’s smugly polite condescension when he inevitably hands him his ass.</p>
<p>Jim was always the only one who could give Spock a real run for his money at the chess table – and he’d win, too, more often than not. It’s like Leonard was reminding Spock before: Jim’s the master of the unexpected. No one on the Enterprise could hold a candle to Spock’s command of the technical side of things, his knowledge of the odds built into any given move, but it was that rigid adherence to the “correct” way to play that so often saw him outfoxed by Jim’s riskier seat-of-his-pants approach. Where Spock saw the rules and principles of the game as variables to be leveraged in precisely calculated combinations, Jim saw them as expectations to be played with and played into, exploited and evaded and used to provide his opponent just enough rope to hang himself with. Spock may have been unequalled when it came to pure gameplay, but Jim was the one who understood that it wasn’t really the game he was playing – it was <i>Spock</i>.</p>
<p>No, Leonard realizes, gazing down at the king in his hand: if there’s a key to cracking Jim’s code, it won’t be found in rigid Vulcan logic. Whatever game they’re playing now, Jim’s playing it with Leonard, not Sarek or Spock or anyone else. And that means Leonard is his own best hope for figuring out the kid’s strategy.</p>
<p>So why send him here at all? It doesn’t make sense. None of this makes any goddamn <i>sense</i>. Sarek got that much right, too.</p>
<p>And there’s one more thing Sarek said – a single concrete piece of advice buried in all the horseshit. Leonard’s not sure he buys it, but it’s all he has to go on at this point.</p>
<p>“How about it, kid?” he asks, thumbing over the shining silver detailing along the base of the chess piece, bright against the dark wood. “You want to go home?”</p>
<p>They’ve been drifting out here for so long, bouncing from system to system. Maybe Jim wants to finally just <i>rest</i>, to be at peace in his own apartment with his tinkering projects and his old books and a host of good memories. He liked San Francisco as well as any other place, Leonard thinks, and it’d be easy to indulge his whims there. They can go to the beach every day, wander through bustling crowds, prowl the antiques shops in search of hidden treasure. They can always take off again if Jim starts getting restless, but in the meantime…well, there are probably worse ways to spend an afterlife.</p>
<p>“Okay, then,” Leonard says. “Computer, set a course for Earth. San Francisco.”</p>
<p><i>”Charting course now,”</i> says the AI, and the next second the nav console is illuminated with a dazzle of blinking yellow lights, the whole system whirring with activity as it works to plot their path <a href="https://youtu.be/wXUloVYbchg">home</a>.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>It’s only later, as the ship hums steadily through the prism-warped black, that Leonard realizes Sarek didn’t offer him the usual salute when he left.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>♥</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0011"><h2>11. Chapter 11</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Almost three months into this now, and I am so grateful for you - for your dedication, for your enthusiasm, for your reactions and wonderings and analyses and generous words. Thank you. I hope you're treating yourself with kindness today.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Leonard can’t say there’s ever been much love lost between him and the sea. While Jim may have been only too eager to pitch himself headlong into any roiling body of water they stumbled upon, Leonard’s attitude toward anything larger than a swimming hole has historically been tolerant at best. Sure, the lazy crystalline shallows of someplace like Piaj are kindly enough, but that's just the pretty embellishment along the edges, harmless frothing rickrack disguising the myriad horrors beyond. The sea is simply too damn <i>big</i>, too deep and dark and mysterious, ruled by its own arcane laws of physics and simmering with riptides and whirlpools and great leviathan monstrosities. If you ask Leonard, it’s nobody’s business what’s brewing out there in the depths, least of all his, and land dwellers would do well to keep to what’s theirs.</p>
<p>So he hasn’t <i>missed</i> living at the edge of the Pacific, per se, but even he has to appreciate what a fine sight it makes on a clear afternoon like this one. The water is a rich, glittering sapphire blue as far as the eye can see, brilliant in the sun, and the waves lapping along the shoreline look as peaceful as their name would suggest, slow and gentle and oh so inviting.</p>
<p><i>Look</i> being the operative word. As he was forever begging Jim to remember, the waters off San Francisco are home to some of the deadliest riptides along the whole western coast of the continent. Even now there could be currents forming just under the surface of those gentle waves, scarcely noticeable to the untrained eye, but powerful and inescapable enough to yank even the strongest swimmers along to their dooms. Yet more evidence of the ocean’s treachery.</p>
<p>“At least I won’t have to worry about keeping your fool ass from drowning," Leonard says, somewhat distracted as he eyeballs another ship headed the opposite direction over the bridge. He's unused to flying in such highly trafficked airspace, and even what's probably a good half kilometer between them feels far too close for comfort. Fortunately, the other ship slips by at a safe distance, and Leonard sails easily past the bridge without further incident. “I just might get to have a genuinely relaxing day at the beach. Won’t that be a first.”</p>
<p>To his left, he can see the imposing towers of HQ rising from the Presidio. If he squints, he can make out bits and pieces of the Academy just beyond, the glinting shine of Cochrane Hall and the bright green of the parade grounds. Up ahead lies the oblong shape of Alcatraz Island, the imposing concrete cellhouse building and lighthouse looking small and flat from this height, and past that a wide glimmering expanse of sunlit waves.</p>
<p>San Francisco’s really not a half-bad looking city when it’s not smoldering in ruins from the latest genocidal maniac’s attack. After so long spent roaming around the galaxy, Leonard has to admit it feels kind of nice to be gliding over such familiar views.</p>
<p>Though, granted, it’s not like he’s ever paid much attention to those views before. Shuttling in from the Enterprise, there was always some last-minute chore to distract him, whether it was reviewing inventory lists, running a scan on a patient (most often Jim, but occasionally Spock or one of Jim’s over-eager protégés), or finalizing a report about whatever bizarre ailments and illnesses the crew had encountered on their latest outing. There never seemed to be more than a half-second to spare for a quick glance out the nearest porthole to assure himself that they were in fact descending with purpose and not plummeting toward a fiery explosive demise.</p>
<p>Not that he would have especially cared to admire the scenery even if he could have. Fortunately for his sanity, he found after the Enterprise’s first couple missions that he could pretty much ignore his fear of flying once they were out in the black. A matter of perspective, mostly – hard to be afraid of crashing when there’s nothing around to crash into – as well as the ship’s carefully engineered stability. Between the grav plating and the limited view, he rarely had the sensation he was moving at all, much less hurtling through the galaxy at speeds beyond his puny mortal comprehension. (That illusion fell away pretty damn quick any time they got walloped by a Klingon torpedo or started whipping around ass-over-teakettle in one of Sulu’s more daring maneuvers, but then that shit would put the fear of God into just about anybody, clinically diagnosed phobia or otherwise.)</p>
<p>Perversely, though, his old fear always came gnawing back through his belly the closer they got to landing. There always came a point when the patchwork quilt of a distant landscape began to grow more tangible and defined, when individual buildings or trees or even tiny living beings started sharpening into view, and suddenly it was all too easy to imagine the myriad ways their approach could go horribly wrong. Much better to busy himself with other tasks so he could ignore the unforgiving ground rushing up to meet them.</p>
<p>It doesn’t feel quite so bad now, though. He supposes he’s gotten used to it, what with all the solo landfalls he’s made since leaving the Enterprise. And of course the ship’s AI has proven itself to be just about the best co-pilot a man could ask for. He probably couldn’t crash this old girl if he tried.</p>
<p>So he lets himself enjoy the feeling of soaring far up above the glittering blue bay, easing into a lazy turn that sends him back over the city proper. It’s been a long time since he called San Francisco home, but there’s a certain sweetness in returning to a place he once lived – a hazy kind of familiarity, fuzzy memories of shapes and colors and the neat intersecting grid of ground-level roads slotting comfortably into place as he turns his gaze on them.</p>
<p>It won’t be so terrible, if this is really where Jim wants to be. They spent some good years here.</p>
<p>The comms channel bristles with static. <i>“Stand by for descent,”</i> says the same voice that ordered him to maintain a holding pattern. <i>“Hangar assignment pending.”</i></p>
<p>“Copy that,” Leonard says, and ups his speed a tad so he’ll reach the sprawling starship hangar complex by the time his assignment comes through.</p>
<p>The voice sounds a little familiar, too. Starfleet runs air traffic control on the civilian side as well, so it’s possible it actually is someone he’s spoken with before. A fellow cadet he crossed paths with at the Academy, maybe, or one of the controllers who gave him his orders for the handful of times he sat in the pilot’s seat of an aircraft nothing at all like this one, swallowing down a swell of nausea and cursing Jim’s name to hell and back.</p>
<p>That last one would be especially fitting. He wouldn’t be here – in any sense of the phrase, really, but specifically sitting in the cockpit of this ship, waiting to be cleared for landing – if Jim hadn’t gotten that wild hair up his ass late in their second year about him earning his piloting certification.</p>
<p>See, Jim had it all planned out. He was going to graduate in three years, get his own ship within another three after that – </p>
<p></p><div>
  <p>
  <i>“You’re out of your overcaffeinated mind,” Leonard tells him, “it’s never been done, even your hero Pike was XO on the Olympus for, what, four years – ”</i>
</p>
  <p>
    <i>“Exactly,” Jim says, like that makes any kind of sense.</i>
  </p>
</div><p> – and once he had a ship he’d need a CMO, and that CMO was going to be Leonard. Never mind <i>Leonard’s</i> plans, which involved staying on at SFM, <i>maybe</i> one day considering a post at a starbase or on some quiet, stable Federation planet. Oh, no, Jim didn’t care about any of that. He had his plan, and he wasn’t budging on a single detail. He was going to get his captaincy, and Leonard was going to be his CMO, and for that to happen, Leonard needed to pass the flight control exams required of all senior starship crew.</p>
<p>For his part, Leonard didn't hesitate to make it known that he most certainly would not be doing any such damn thing, and that Jim would just have to find some other knucklehead to skip off into the waking nightmare of space with him, because it sure as hell wouldn’t be Leonard.</p>
<p>So needless to say he spent most of his limited free time that semester logging hours in the flight sim pods, most often with Jim crammed in alongside him.</p>
<p>God alone knew why he’d bothered pretending there was any other possible outcome. Jim had already proven himself to be stubborn as a mule and twice as wily, besides which he’d settled comfortably into the habit of cheerfully brushing aside Leonard’s most adamant declarations as mere suggestions. Leonard never stood a chance.</p>
<p>In fairness, Jim was a surprisingly capable teacher, self-appointed though he might have been. He approached the undertaking as seriously as he approached anything in those days, and Leonard remembers being grudgingly impressed by how naturally the kid took to the role of instructor. He was encouraging in a supportive, patient way Leonard hadn’t seen from him before, and at the same time he seemed to know when to let a touch of his usual brash confidence seep through, just enough to buoy Leonard up out of the worst of his fear without tipping him over into aggravation that his <i>very real concerns</i> weren’t being taken seriously.</p>
<p>Leonard never admitted as much, but all those grueling, nerve-wracking hours of practice went a long way toward making a believer out of him. For the first time, he looked at Jim – at the impulsive, cocksure, loudmouthed, sleep-deprived, overachieving bastard he’d somehow ended up with as his best friend – and he knew in his heart that all Jim’s grand plans were going to work out. Jim Kirk was going to be a starship captain someday, one of the finest goddamn captains the Federation ever saw, and Leonard would be there with him every step of the way. </p>
<p>That’s not to say he was always <i>happy</i> about it. For one thing, he and Jim had wildly different definitions of what constituted “acceptable risk” – a disagreement which came to a dramatic head on his very first flight in the pilot’s seat of a real ship.</p>
<p></p><div>
  <p>
  <i>“See?” Jim says with a hearty clap on the shoulder. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”</i>
</p>
  <p><i>“We almost </i>died<i>,” Leonard says, the words squeaking out at an unusually high pitch he’ll deny under oath.</i></p>
  <p>
  <i>Jim lets out an exaggerated scoffing noise that grates over Leonard’s frayed nerves. “Nah, no way. I had it under control.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>Even going by Jim’s abysmally low standard for “under control,” Leonard’s not buying it. He opens his mouth to let Jim know exactly how much shit he’s full of, really lay it out for him point by point, but just thinking about their near miss outside the entrance bay is making his chest seize up again, and he can’t pull the words together. He settles for glaring, leaving it to his expression to communicate what a colossal idiot Jim is and how fervently Leonard regrets ever crossing his path.</i>
</p>
  <p><i>“Hey, we pulled up in time, didn’t we? We had at least a few more seconds before we would’ve really been fucked.” Jim is smirking, but there’s an odd twist to it, a shade of something Leonard can’t quite put a name to. “Come on, Bones, you didn’t actually think I’d let you crash, did you? I spent all weekend prepping for that Interspecies Ethics debate tomorrow. I’m taking the Kobayashi Maru next week. </i>And<i> I promised to get you super drunk after this, which means at least one in three odds of hearing some embarrassing med school story. I’m not going out in a crash when I’ve got all that to live for.”</i></p>
  <p><i>Leonard rolls his eyes, more out of habit than anything. He’s already coming down from his panic, his chest loosening and his breathing evening out as Jim’s words sink in. Jim was right next to him the whole time. Jim’s had his certs since their second semester, and he’s ranked in the top five for flight control, not just in their class of cadets, but across all four years of command track. And they </i>did<i> pull up in time, because Jim took over as soon as he saw they were in trouble.</i></p>
  <p>
  <i>Jim wouldn’t have let him crash.</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“And hey,” Jim adds brightly, no doubt picking up on Leonard’s unspoken concession, “right up to the end, you were doing really well. You got us, like, ninety-eight percent of the way there.” He pats the console fondly, as if the tiny ship is some kind of favored pet instead of a battered old rust bucket which very nearly delivered them into an early grave. “You just needed a little help sticking the landing.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“Something tells me that math ain’t gonna go over so well with the examiner,” Leonard says, relieved to note that his voice has dropped back down into a more respectable register.</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>Jim’s eyes crinkle up in a big cocky grin. “Guess we’ll have to keep practicing.”</i>
</p>
  <p><i>“In a </i>pig’s eye<i> we will,” Leonard says, but Jim is already tugging him up out of his seat, throwing an arm over his shoulders, chattering away about the bars they should hit tonight as he steers them out of the cockpit, down the steps, back onto solid ground.</i></p>
</div><p>Things haven’t changed so much, Leonard thinks wryly. Here he is, back in the pilot’s seat of some flying tin can, all because Jim never did learn to take “no” for an answer.</p>
<p>At long last, the traffic controller clears him to land, directing him to set down in Civilian Hangar 24 and then report to Dock Control for processing.</p>
<p>This entrance and landing go a lot smoother than his first – partly because of all the practice he’s had recently, but mostly because this ship is a lot more advanced than the Academy’s junky old training crafts, and the AI does most of the heavy lifting. Between the two of them, they tuck into their designated berth, and Leonard goes about shutting down all the systems, scanning the various consoles to make sure he’s not skipping any of the protocol. He may have some experience under his belt now, but he’ll never feel like a true pilot, and it would be just his luck if he forgot some critical step that ended up draining the power core or blowing the whole hangar sky-high.</p>
<p>Once the ship is well and truly powered down, Leonard stands up from the pilot’s seat and ducks back into the living area to gather his things. He glances inside his bag to confirm he’s got everything, and then takes a more precise inventory of the box containing all of Jim’s gifts, anxious to make sure he’s not leaving a single item behind. He can always get a new pair of jeans or piece of tech, but he can’t replace the irreplaceable.</p>
<p>Satisfied that he’s got everything accounted for, he hoists the bag’s strap over his shoulder and picks up the box, balancing it carefully in the crook of one arm so he has a hand free to lock up the ship. He peeks into the cockpit a final time on his way out, taking one last look around the cramped space where he’s spent so much time over the course of his long journey across the quadrant. He can’t imagine he’ll have much use for a spacecraft after this.</p>
<p>He lingers there behind the pilot’s seat a beat too long, hesitating, strangely embarrassed by the impulse that’s struck him – and then he thinks, <i>Oh, what the hell,</i> and reaches out to give the console a fond pat.</p>
<p>This little ship’s done all right by him. She’s earned a rest.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>“Something’s wrong.”</p>
<p>That’s right up there with <i>security, please</i> on the short list of things a man doesn’t especially want to hear while he’s passing through planetary customs. “Beg pardon?” Leonard asks, straightening up from his slouch to blink at the Dock Control officer across the processing station. “Is there a problem with my reports? I’m sorry, I’m pretty new to this – ”</p>
<p>“Oh, no,” the officer says, sparing him a quick glance before going back to frowning at their screen, “it’s just – it says here that you’re active duty with Starfleet. Currently posted to the USS Enterprise-A?” They frame it as a question, as though the confusion might genuinely be on their end.</p>
<p>“No, that’s – I mean, I <i>was</i>, but – I resigned my commission. Honorable discharge. My file should’ve been updated ages ago.”</p>
<p>Come to think of it, he has no clear sense of how long it’s actually been since he left the Enterprise. Time got kinda soupy out there in the black. He supposes he should look at a calendar at some point if he’s planning to stick around here on Earth for a while – get his bearings, start making some sort of plan for himself instead of just drifting along through the nebulous fog of arbitrary deep space time.</p>
<p>“I see.” The officer swipes around some more. “Ah, yes, I do see there's a note of that. It's probably just a glitch in the system. I’ll contact the personnel database team to have your status corrected.” They hand him back his PADD. “Everything else seems to be in order. Welcome to Earth, Dr. McCoy.”</p>
<p>“Thank you.” Leonard slips the PADD back into his bag, zips it up and lifts the box from where he'd set it down on the counter.</p>
<p>“You’ve been gone for a long time.”</p>
<p>Leonard looks back up, surprised by such informal chitchat from an on-duty officer. Must be a slow day for arrivals. “Yeah, I have.”</p>
<p>“A long time,” the officer repeats, shaking their head. “It changes you, doesn't it? Endless possibility, infinite space. It's hard to hold onto your sense of where you've come from, where you're going. Where you truly belong.”

</p>
<p>A <i>really</i> slow day. And a lifer's penchant for reminiscing, it seems. “Sure,” Leonard says, hoping that simple agreement will speed things along. “I reckon that's so.”</p>
<p>The Dock Control officer smiles blandly. “But you've wandered long enough, haven't you? All you want now is to go home.”</p>
<p>“Right.” Leonard graciously refrains from pointing out that this little chat is in fact what's keeping him from doing just that. He shifts his weight, trying to think of a more polite way to detach. He’s out of practice enough with casual conversation that being the focus of this bored old-timer's attention is making him strangely uneasy, like a confined animal released back into the wild, out of step with the norms and expectations he once at least somewhat understood. “Well, uh…thanks again. Have a good one.”</p>
<p>It’s probably just his recluse’s anxiety talking, but he’d swear he feels the officer’s eyes on him for his whole way out of the hangar.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>Memories seem to flow right through him as he passes along the winding streets, a gentle current carrying him on through the scenery of his old life to reveal another familiar landmark around every bend.</p>
<p>There’s that place where he used to grab coffee on his way to the hospital, and the bakery with the only decent peach cobbler to be had west of the Mississippi.</p>
<p>There’s the Burmese restaurant with the noodles Jim likes, and the park bench beside which he was ingloriously sick at the end of his first night on the town after his long stint at SFM, and the shop where they saw the antique clock Jim went back for in secret and restored for him as a Christmas present after Leonard mentioned in passing that his grandparents had one just like it when he was growing up.</p>
<p>There’s the turn that leads down to the beach Jim would drag him to nearly every day through the long quiet summer between their first and second year at the Academy, and the library they’d hole up in for days toward the end of every term, and the bar that became their local after graduation when they realized they were usually too tired in the brief interludes between missions to go prowling through different neighborhoods just to get drunk.</p>
<p>And finally, there’s Jim’s building with its unusual spiraling architecture, curved windows aglow in the sunlight slanting between the nearby skyscrapers. It was a bright, cloudless afternoon like this one the last time he was here, clear and sunny in the golden hour before the evening fog rolled in. A little too sunny, he remembers: he was on his way back from a meeting with the brass, and the exertion of climbing the long hill up from the SFM campus had him feeling even stuffier than usual in his strangling monkey suit of a dress uniform. He’d planned on heading straight home to peel out of his uniform and drink away the dread of five godforsaken years out in the heartless unpredictable nightmare of space, but Jim had messaged him during the meeting, whining about how much packing he had left to do, and so he detoured here to Jim’s place instead. Jim laughed at him when he opened the door to find him scowling and flushed in his itch-clammy grays, waved him in with a slap on the back and said he could borrow a change of clothes if he promised to help kill the last of Chekov’s pepper vodka.</p>
<p>Jim didn’t really need help with the vodka, of course – or with packing, for that matter. It only took the two of them a couple hours to pull the rest of his things together, and it wasn’t like him to procrastinate on something like that in the first place. Most likely he’d left it to the last minute with the specific aim of badgering Leonard into coming over to help him the night before they left, when he knew Leonard would be working himself up over their impending departure.</p>
<p>That was Jim’s way, though – had been since they were at the Academy. It took Leonard far too long to start realizing what a mighty odd coincidence it was that Jim always seemed to develop a pressing need for a weightlifting spotter on days Leonard couldn’t bring himself to get out of bed, or how he only got confused over his Intro to Xenobiology assignments when Leonard was so stressed he couldn’t focus on his own coursework, or how on nights Leonard was lingering over a touch-and-go patient long past shift change Jim would inevitably turn up at the hospital complaining of hunger and demanding company for a late dinner at the mess. His broken-wing act, Leonard came to think of it: feigning some small but urgent need to lure Leonard out of his depressed torpor or frenzied anxiety spiral, like a killdeer dragging around trying to draw a predator away from its nest. It was kinda sweet, in a dysfunctional sort of way. And it <i>worked</i>, too, every goddamn time. Even after Leonard had learned to recognize the ploy, he'd still go along with it: he didn't want to break Jim of the habit of coming to him when it mattered, and it <i>was</i> a relief to play into the pretense, to refocus his attention on Jim and what he could do for him instead of the fraught convoluted mess of his own bullshit. It was always so much easier to tend to Jim's needs than his own. He supposes he should count his blessings that Jim only ever exploited that for his own good. </p>
<p>Back outside Jim’s door once again, in far more comfortable clothes this time, Leonard shifts the box in his arms so he can raise a hand to the scanner, which hums thoughtfully for a second before chiming its approval.</p>
<p><i>“Bioscan confirmed,”</i> says a robotically cordial voice as the door slides open. <i>“Good afternoon, Bones.”</i></p>
<p>It’s been so long since Leonard’s been called by that name that he can’t help but smile. “Hi,” he says softly – to the voice, and to the apartment he’s walking into, filled with late afternoon sunlight and everything Jim left behind on Earth when they departed on the five-year mission.</p>
<p>It’s a lot to take in. He hasn’t been here for years, but nothing’s changed, of course. It feels like no time has passed at all, like Jim might walk into the kitchen any second now with a bottle of rye in one hand and a take-out menu in the other.</p>
<p>Leonard sets his box down on the countertop and swings his bag up alongside it. There’s plenty of room for them. Jim kept a pretty spartan kitchen, and with him long since cleared out there aren’t any half-eaten curries or discarded coffee mugs cluttering up the place. Just a few rarely used appliances, a couple shelves halfheartedly stocked with a motley assortment of dishes, and the table in the center of the room where Leonard used to find Jim slumped over a cup of coffee after a rowdy night, nursing a hangover and swearing he’d never drink again. (A vow which usually lasted about as long as it took for the recovery hypo to kick in.)</p>
<p>Leonard runs his fingers over the tabletop as he passes, and pauses to examine the framed drawing hung a bit crookedly on the wall by the doorway to the living room: a bunch of yellow, red, and blue blobs, vaguely humanoid-shaped, all clumped together beneath what might generously be interpreted as a starship.</p>
<p>Leonard smiles to himself. He’d forgotten about Demora’s funny little family portrait. She gave it to Jim the last time he had them all over, shortly before they left on the mission. Jim naturally accepted it with the lavish praise and thanks expected of any adult with a heart in their chest before setting the page discreetly to one side, telling her he needed to frame it so it would stay safe and perfect forever when he hung it on the wall.</p>
<p>Leonard assumed at the time that that last part was a kindly lie to appease a three-year-old with all the long-term memory of a fruit fly, but here the drawing is, framed on the wall just like Jim promised. He shouldn’t be surprised. Jim could get sentimental over the smallest things sometimes, especially where kids were concerned.</p>
<p>Leonard straightens the picture frame and continues into the living room. There’s more of Jim’s personal touch in here: the oversized couch Leonard’s crashed on too many times to count, the streamlined coffee table, the chess set, the record player pieced together from a hundred different parts Jim spent months hunting down. He was so proud of that thing. Maybe later Leonard will see if he remembers how to work it, put on one of Jim’s prized handful of records and imagine the smile on his face as the apartment fills with some scratchy old tune.</p>
<p>The dominating feature of the room is the bookshelf, a massive piece of Jim’s own design which takes up the better portion of the far wall. The kid did love his books – <i>real</i> books, he called them, ancient paper things scavenged from antique shops and specialized dealers around the city. He started collecting them their first year at the Academy, and by the end of their second term the stacks against the wall on his side of their room had already grown nearly knee-high.</p>
<p></p><div>
  <p>
  <i>“Okay,” Leonard says as he follows Jim down the aisle of yet another dim, musty-smelling shop. “Explain to me again how it makes sense to spend all damn day trawling through the city looking for some half-rotted paper fossil you’re not even sure you’ll find, when you could get the same file on your PADD in about a nanosecond without leaving the comfort of your own bed.”</i>
</p>
  <p><i>“They’re not fossils,” Jim says over his shoulder, sounding offended on the books’ behalf. “Show some respect.” He wanders farther down the aisle, his reds standing out in bright contrast to the dark shelves and their rows of faded covers. “It’s not about convenience. Digital books are so…I don’t know, </i>soulless<i>. You could make a million copies of the same file with the tap of a screen, but there’s no character to them, you know? Not like these.” He skims his fingertips along the spines of the books on a nearby shelf. “I mean, can you even imagine the story behind each of these? Just think of how many hands have held them over the years, the lives they came in and out of, the changes all those people lived through. And these books survived it all. That’s not something you can just download. They’re history, Bones.”</i></p>
  <p><i>“So’s all kinds of outdated shit,” Leonard reminds him.  “That’s why it’s </i>history<i>. You going to start working out your Warp Theory assignments on an abacus, too? Want me to reach for a trephine the next time one of your hand-to-hand students busts your head open?” </i></p>
  <p><i>“That was </i>one<i> time,” Jim says, willfully missing the point, as usual. “And you know K’havi felt really bad. It was my fault for not watching out for that posterior tentacle.” He looks back at Leonard with exactly the kind of self-satisfied half-smirk that tells Leonard he’s definitely going to be annoyed by whatever Jim says next. “Besides, aren’t you the one who’s always complaining about the great societal ill of replicators and how they’re devaluing good old-fashioned craftsmanship and hard work or whatever? How kids these days won’t learn to appreciate the value of anything if they can just press a button and get a new one magicked up for them? I’d think you’d be on my side about this. Where’s your internal consistency?”</i></p>
  <p>
  <i>Leonard harrumphs, leaning against the shelf to give his tired feet a rest. “Must’ve left it behind in one of the eighty-three thousand other bookshops we’ve been through today.”</i>
</p>
  <p><i>“Math is definitely not your strong suit,” Jim says, as sympathetic as he ever is to Leonard’s outing-related griping. “Maybe </i>you<i> should start using an abacus.” He peers closer at the shelf he’s been fondling, and his face lights up. “Ooh, </i>Unua Libro<i>. Uhura was talking about this at our club meeting last week.” He slips the book off the shelf and cracks it open with the painstaking care he only ever shows for old things, riffling gingerly through its rustling pages, examining each with interest. “Think if I got her this, she’d finally tell me her name?”</i></p>
  <p>
  <i>Leonard snorts. “Keep dreaming.” It just so happens that he knows Cadet Uhura’s first name, but he’s not about to let on to Jim – doctor-patient confidentiality, and all. Besides, it’s good for Jim to learn that he can’t have everything he wants. Builds character. The entertainment value of his increasingly pathetic attempts to weasel the information out of the poor woman is an added bonus.</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“I’ll win her over one of these days,” Jim says confidently. He turns another page and smiles down at something he sees on the next one. “And you, too.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“Me?” Leonard echoes, unable to hide his disbelief. If wasting his precious day off following Jim around on another of his archaeological treasure hunts doesn’t say “won over,” he’s not sure what would. He’d rather leave that unspoken, though – he does still have one or two molecules of pride left to him.</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“Yeah, you.” Jim closes the book and brandishes it in Leonard’s direction. “Come on, just smell it. Doesn’t it smell like history?”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“I’m not smelling your damn fossil, you idiot,” Leonard says, laughing despite himself. “Get that thing out of my face. Are we done here? It’s getting on toward dinnertime.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“Yeah, I guess. Just let me settle up.” He squeezes past Leonard, heading back toward the exchange counter up front. “You’ll get it one day, Bones. Mark my words.”</i>
</p>
  <p>
  <i>“Don’t hold your breath,” Leonard says. “And put some hustle in it, kid. You owe me murtabak.”</i>
</p>
</div><p>Leonard was right, for once – despite all Jim’s efforts, he never did get what the big honking deal was about paper books. Even so, he has to admit it’s a hell of a collection packed onto these shelves. There must be near two hundred books here, big hefty tomes and slender novellas all squeezed in together, running the gamut in size, condition, and quality. Some are leather-bound and distinguished-looking, stamped in gold, while others wear flimsy paper jackets over cloth-and-board covers, and still others are nothing more than brittle paper, cracking down their spines after centuries of use.</p>
<p>Leonard glances across the shelf at eye level, scanning the titles. Jim wasn’t picky about genre or even language, and Leonard only even vaguely recognizes a mere handful – <i>Through the Looking-Glass</i>, <i>The Turn of the Screw</i>, <i>In Search of Lost Time</i>, <i>The Trial</i>, <i>The Things They Carried</i> – though he’s probably seen most of them off the shelf at one point or another, carefully laid open in the protective cradle of Jim’s hands.</p>
<p>There’s one book at the far right end of the shelf with no cover at all, its exposed spine striated with splintering brown veins of glue. Leonard might not have noticed the homely little thing at all except that it’s sticking out a few centimeters from the rest, despite looking to be on the smaller side.</p>
<p><i>Ah.</i> Okay, then. Leonard’s pretty sure he’s been at this long enough to know a cue when he sees one.</p>
<p>He tilts the book out from between its neighbors and holds it in both hands, like Jim would. After mulling over his options for a second, he decides to prop it up on its glue-streaked spine and let it fall open on its own – which it does, very cooperatively, splaying itself open across his hands to reveal two yellowed pages, a good portion of the left one marked up with thick hand-drawn lines of black ink.</p>
<p>Leonard chuckles. “Well, don’t you just put the B in ‘subtle.’” Either Jim is getting better at this, or Leonard was <i>really</i> bad at recognizing hints early on.</p>
<p>He shakes his head and turns his attention to the passage Jim has so obligingly directed him to:</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <span class="u">All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments the same way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment which interests them. It is only an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.</span>
  </i>
</p>
<p>Beads on a string. That’s it – that’s exactly what Jim used to say, six drinks in and ranting about the inherent absurdity of time.</p>
<p>Leonard shifts the book into his right hand and raises his left to touch the page, very gently, lightly trailing over each line of text and the faint grooves of ink <a href="https://youtu.be/TVVntbVIZbc">beneath</a>.</p>
<p>“Moments, huh?” he murmurs.</p>
<p>That’s what he’s been doing this whole time, isn’t it: looking at moments. Every place Jim’s brought him to has stirred up more memories than he knows what to do with, all of them as vivid and clear as that snapshot from Yorktown – sometimes sweet, sometimes painful, but always theirs, his and Jim’s, tiny precious fragments of their life together.</p>
<p>Maybe that’s all Jim has been trying to do: to lead him back through the many moments they shared, scattered as they are across the galaxy, and look at them together. And if that’s the case, then maybe what Jim’s telling him now is that those moments, <i>their</i> moments –</p>
<p>(the two of them on Piaj, on Yorktown, on the Enterprise, on Nibiru)</p>
<p>(on couches and in beds and wading into the sea)</p>
<p>(Jim beside him in a training craft cockpit, Jim grabbing onto his wrist with a bloody hand, Jim kissing him and smiling at him and moaning his name and falling asleep in his arms)</p>
<p>– that any of those moments are just as real as the current one. That they haven’t vanished into the past like he thought, but instead are waiting there for him, whole and immutable, perfectly preserved.</p>
<p>That even if he never gets Jim back the way he once was, he hasn’t really lost him at all.</p>
<p>He closes the book and holds it close to his chest with careful, steady hands, the way he might hold a snuffling newborn or his granny’s crystal punch bowl, something fragile and priceless.</p>
<p>“You know, you’re a real sap sometimes, kid,” he says, lower and rougher than he means to – and if it comes out sounding more like <i>I love you</i>, well, that’s no less true in this moment than in any <a href="https://youtu.be/hZT5eTrmm58">other</a>.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>♥</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0012"><h2>12. Chapter 12</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>12 weeks we've been doing this, y'all. That's wild. You're heroes for sticking with me this long. I hope you know how grateful I am for you.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
He ignores it, at first.
</p>
<p>He's got his feet up on the coffee table, drink in hand as he relaxes on the couch. Comfortable, or as comfortable as he ever gets these days. His back is still bothering him some, and his neck too, his body apparently in no great hurry to forgive him for the ill treatment he put it through over the course of his long wandering trek around the galaxy. One of the many costs of advancing age, he reflects grimly: your aches and pains don’t just vanish the instant you’ve decided to take better care of yourself.</p>
<p>It’s pleasant enough, though – sitting here in Jim’s living room with a couple fingers of good scotch, listening to the music flowing out of Jim’s beloved record player, some full-voiced woman crooning on in a language he doesn’t speak. He couldn’t put a name to the singer or the song, but it’s familiar in the hazy background way that all of Jim’s old records are, reminding him of the many evenings they whiled away together right here on this couch: shooting the shit over drinks or take-out, venting about their days, sharing Fleet gossip, arguing about whatever trivial point of contention Jim had decided was his latest hill to die on. Leonard always loved those quiet nights in. It was nice not having to worry about Jim finding his way into trouble at some bar or ditching him a couple hours in to swan off with the night’s conquest; even nicer to have Jim all to himself for a spell, hearkening back to their years spent cooped up together in their shoebox dorm room, just the two of them. And it's nice again, now, to revisit some of those nights, sift through his countless memories of being with Jim and look at any which interests him. It’s an embarrassment of riches to choose from – so many priceless moments to wander back into whenever he wants to. He could stay here on this couch forever doing just that.</p>
<p>
  <i>Bzzt. Bzzt.</i>
</p>
<p>Leonard cocks an ear, curious. Did he hear something? Hard to tell over the sound of the music.</p>
<p>It was probably nothing. What would it be, anyway? He’s alone in Jim’s apartment. (<i>His</i> apartment now, he supposes, at least for as long as Jim wants to park himself here.) It was likely just the building settling, or a traffic noise from outside, if anything.</p>
<p>He takes another sip of scotch and turns his attention back to a different moment, a sweeter one, warm with Jim’s presence: another scratchy classical song lilting in the background, the competing scents of a tabletop packed with takeout containers, Jim slouched a little too close beside him on the couch, Jim gesturing wildly with his chopsticks to illustrate his point, Jim’s bright eyes and brighter smile, Jim’s laugh that could fill any room…</p>
<p>
  <i>Bzzt. Bzzt.</i>
</p>
<p>Leonard sits up properly. What <i>is</i> that? Shit – maybe something’s wrong with the record. He leaves his drink on the coffee table and hustles over to the record player to inspect it for signs of malfunctioning. Jim would kill him if he let his pride and joy break down after all the time he put into it.</p>
<p>Leonard doesn’t have Jim’s eye for mechanics, and there’s no obvious problem to be found – no smoke hissing out from the player’s innards, no stuttering of the needle along the record’s grooves. He stops it anyway, just to be on the safe side, gingerly lifting the arm away from the record’s surface and shifting it into its resting spot.</p>
<p>With the music stopped, he listens intently to the quiet of the apartment, the dull steady hum of the city outside filtering in from beyond the windows. He can’t hear anything amiss. It must have been something with the record player after all. Damn.</p>
<p>“Sorry, kid,” he says, stroking a gentle apology over the side of the device. “I’ll have to take it somewhere to get it checked out. Unless you can point me toward a manual or – ”</p>
<p>
  <i>Bzzt. Bzzt.</i>
</p>
<p>Leonard stops short. That wasn’t the record player. But it was definitely something. And these days, something is likely to be some<i>one</i>.</p>
<p>He glances around the living room, searching for the source of the noise. The most obvious culprit would be his comm, but there’s no activity on it when he doubles back to the couch to check. The other items on the coffee table don’t seem to be at fault, either: there’s no damage to or rattling from Leonard’s tumbler of scotch, and the zinnias are unruffled in their vase, the overlapping petals of each rounded bloom backlit to a warm golden orange by the sunlight pouring through the window.</p>
<p>Nothing looks to be the matter with the bookshelf, all Jim's cherished paper fossils packed together onto the shelves with no noticeable gaps or signs of disturbance, and the chess table is similarly unaffected, each piece set neatly in their squares, scattered across the gleaming marbled boards.</p>
<p>The clock, maybe? He examines it closely, peering into its glass-covered face, drawing his fingers along its elegantly carved edges to make sure he’s not missing anything, but it seems to be ticking along okay.</p>
<p>
  <i>Bzzt. Bzzt.</i>
</p>
<p>So what the hell is it making that sound?</p>
<p>Having run out of possibilities in the living room, Leonard ventures into the bedroom to continue his hunt. Here, too, there’s nothing visibly out of order, but he investigates the bed just to be sure, pulls the pillows away from where they’re squashed against the headboard and pats over the rumpled white sheets, shakes out the covers hanging off the side of the mattress in a twisted knot.</p>
<p>No dice. It would seem that after the last couple of softballs, Jim’s inclined to make him work for this particular clue.</p>
<p>
  <i>Bzzt. Bzzt.</i>
</p>
<p>That sounded like it was coming from his left, past the neat stacks of books lining the wall. The Yorktown box is on the dresser – maybe it’s something in there? He opens it up, carefully shifting aside the fragile vine tangled over one flap, and paws through the contents, checking over the recorder, the chess piece with her delicately gilded crown, the small Starfleet-issue PADD –</p>
<p>His <i>PADD</i>.</p>
<p>He abandons the box and reaches instead into his unzipped bag to dig for his own PADD, which buzzes again just as he’s pulling it out, lighting up in his hand.</p>
<p>It’s a goddamn <i>travel reminder</i>.</p>
<p>“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” he mutters. He jabs at the little aircraft icon, and a tinny but chipper voice pipes out of the PADD to inform him:</p>
<p>
  <i>“Flight 421 to Riverside Regional Airport is currently projected for an on-time departure from Terminal B of San Francisco Interplanetary Spaceport. Swipe up to check in for your flight, or swipe down to cancel your reservation.”</i>
</p>
<p>“Cute,” Leonard says, glaring accusingly around the room in no particular direction. “Real cute. Is a little advance notice too much to ask for?”</p>
<p>He swipes up on the alert and tosses the PADD back into his bag, quickly followed by the rest of the items he was foolish enough to unpack. <i>Apparently</i> he has a flight to catch.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>Leonard will never be a fan of atmospheric air travel. As far as he’s concerned, its sole redeeming feature is that it doesn’t require you to be dissolved into carbon-based dust, unlike the unholy scrambled-up molecular hell of transporter technology, which unfortunately looks poised to overtake it as the primary method for civilian travel before too long. Yorktown already relies on their system of pre-programmed personal transporter stations as the station’s main mode of public transit, and Leonard noticed on his way to the spaceport that the damn things have started popping up in San Francisco, too. It’s only a matter of time before it spreads beyond urban centers and puts old-fashioned vehicular transit out of business for good.</p>
<p>Goddamn mad science nonsense. It’s irresponsible to be putting these systems into place on such a large scale before research has caught up to the long-term effects of regular use. Leonard doesn’t care what Jim and Scotty and all those other lunatics have to say about it: a man is more than just his arrangement of atoms, and you can’t go unmaking and remaking him day in and day out and not expect there to be consequences. But of course there’s no convincing these starry-eyed engineers of that. They just parrot back the same arguments they make for replication technology, blathering on about technical accuracy and the granular precision of their reconstruction models. Cold-blooded bench science horseshit, all of it, and a slippery slope toward a true existential nightmare. Just because your artificial fabrication or reconstruction is atomically identical to the real deal doesn’t mean it's the same thing, and it sure as hell doesn’t make it <i>right</i>. Have any of these short-sighted so-called innovators ever even <i>heard</i> of a little thing called bioethics?</p>
<p><i>Oh, please, like you have any room to talk there,</i> Jim would usually say at about this point in the argument, because if rhetorical dirty pool were a sport then Jim Kirk would be a Federation Olympian, and suddenly Leonard would find himself on the back foot, forced to justify his own perfectly sound medical calls while Jim’s smug ass lived to champion technological “progress” and “innovation” another day.</p>
<p>Regrettably, Jim’s side will almost certainly win in the end, if only because nearly every species out there seems predisposed to overvalue convenience and undervalue their own personal risk. But they’re not quite there yet, and while Leonard still has an alternative to transporters, he’s damn well going to take it.</p>
<p>That said, as grateful as he is to have another option, traditional air travel is hardly a rollicking good time. It’s crowded, uncomfortable, nauseating, and carries a significantly greater-than-zero chance of violent death. What is there not to hate?</p>
<p>If Leonard had his way he’d avoid it entirely, stick to hovercars or trains or his own two God-given feet, but sometimes it’s the only realistic choice for long trips – and of course, where today’s travel is concerned, he didn’t actually have much of a choice at all.</p>
<p>At least this flight is on a civilian craft, so it’s somewhat more comfortable than the trips Leonard has endured in stripped-down Starfleet vehicles. The flip side of that is that it’s filled with <i>civilians</i>, business travelers and tourists and noisy kids, lots of mellow corn-fed folks with easy smiles and Jim’s flat Midwestern accent. It’s been a long time since Leonard has been confined to close quarters with so many strangers for an extended period, and he can’t say he’s particularly missed it.</p>
<p>Still, he doesn’t try to hide in the head this time, for which he thinks he deserves some credit. He isn’t even drinking his way through the trip, which has always been his other preferred strategy to get through cross-country flights when forced to travel solo – because of course the best coping mechanism of all is to have Jim with him, talking his ear off, crowding into his personal space, demanding help with a crossword clue, flirting indiscriminately with the flight staff, and just generally making a nuisance of himself in that way which came so naturally to him that it took Leonard years to realize he was playing it up intentionally.</p>
<p>But Jim’s not here now – or he is, but he isn’t, whatever the hell backwards logic Sarek was trying to sell him – and so, instead of reverting back to old habits, Leonard hunkers down resolutely in his seat and pulls out the book he took from Jim’s apartment. He was planning to start reading it anyway, and he may as well take advantage of the opportunity to distract himself. Maybe all that stuff about moments and beads and Trafal-whatevers will make more sense if he reads the whole thing through.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>It doesn’t.</p>
<p>That little excerpt he chanced upon at first encounter with the book was apparently a rotten case of false advertising, because this thing is damn near incomprehensible. There are words, Standard words, but try as Leonard might he can’t make them come together in any semblance of sense. He knows Jim enjoyed the challenge of more experimental narrative styles, but this is ridiculous – even worse than that awful Irish doorstopper of a stream-of-consciousness nightmare Jim tried to convince him was some great work of literary genius, and Leonard never imagined anything would beat that monstrosity.</p>
<p>Christ. No wonder Jim only ever talked about this book when he was drunk.</p>
<p>Leonard flips ahead several pages, skimming to see whether it might start resembling anything like coherence, and his eye catches on the stark blackness of hand-inked lines, just like the ones he found before. Another underscored passage.</p>
<p>Thank God. If Jim is so keen on getting him to appreciate this precious book of his, Leonard’s going to need an assist. Maybe some helpful annotations in the margins to give him an idea of what the hell he’s supposed to be getting out of this mess.</p>
<p>This passage is shorter than the other, just one brief paragraph in the middle of the page, a single sentence set apart on its own:</p>
<p>
  <i>
    <span class="u">And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.</span>
  </i>
</p>
<p>Leonard reads the sentence again. And then a third time, and a fourth, like it might say something different, but the words remain stubbornly the same, even as the rest of the page seems to swim before his eyes.</p>
<p>He sits back in his seat, his arms tingling with the start of goosebumps, and thinks: <i>What in the living fuck does </i>that<i> mean?</i></p>
<p>On the surface, it seems relatively simple, a blessedly intelligible and self-contained thought in the midst of the author’s disjointed rambling. Another offhand rumination on the nature of time, not so different from the first passage he read, only this doesn’t jive nicely with what he thought he understood of that other one.</p>
<p>The passage Jim offered him before was sort of sweet. A bit weird, sure, but it was a familiar, benign weirdness, a reprise from some comfortable night spent drinking on the couch, prying the bottle out of Jim’s perilous grip to pour himself another glass, paying more attention to the blue of Jim’s eyes than the rambling horseshit coming out of his mouth.</p>
<p>This one, though – it just feels different. There’s something unsettling, almost <i>ominous</i> about it, an urgency he can’t attribute to any word or phrase in particular, but which has the hairs rising at the back of his neck nevertheless.</p>
<p>Those lines he read in Jim’s apartment felt like an attempt at comfort – a reminder of all they have, a promise that Jim will never leave him.</p>
<p>This feels like a warning.</p>
<p>He wants to ask Jim what it means, but he’s surrounded by people. He can’t just go speaking to thin air like he’s gotten in the habit of. Anyway, it’s not like Jim could answer him, not really. The two marked-up book pages are the most direct communication Jim’s managed yet, and Leonard is still left wondering what he’s actually trying to say, questioning his own understanding of Jim’s intent for the thousandth time since all this started.</p>
<p>He closes the book, too rattled to keep struggling through it, and sticks it back in his bag for safekeeping. He still has goosebumps, though that might have more to do with the fact that the chill of the aircraft is starting to get to him, even through the sturdy sweaters he’s wearing. He thinks about asking for a blanket, but he doesn’t much feel like talking with anyone right now, so he just pulls his jacket tighter around him and closes his eyes, listening to the low hum of the engines and trying his very best not to think about anything at all.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>He doesn’t remember falling asleep, but the next time he opens his eyes they’re descending into Riverside, soaring in over wide rolling fields just starting to sprout green. It’s spring here, he realizes with a dull sort of surprise. That’s funny. For some reason he had it in his head that it was summer. It <i>was</i> summer in San Francisco, he thought: blue skies, sunny days, evening fog rolling in across the glittering bay. But, no – it was too cold for summer, wasn’t it? That’s why he’s wearing so many layers. He must have gotten it confused somehow. He never did look at that calendar like he’d thought he should.</p>
<p>Then again, what does it matter? Right now it may be spring, but it’s summer at some other time, at lots of other times, in the future and in the past. There are infinite moments stretching out from this one in both directions - like the Rocky Mountains, or one of those long neat furrows of sprouting corn - and in them the fields are blooming, withering, lying fallow, growing wild.</p>
<p>Jim is there, in some of those moments: a genius-level repeat offender on his way to the bar, a fifth-grader writing secret admirer notes for Taylor Prewitt, a mutinous teenager being packed off to live with his aunt. In one moment, he’s screaming down a dirt road through the fields in his pa’s old Corvette; in another, he’s driving a motorcycle along a long lonely strip of highway toward the shipyard, toward Leonard and all their moments together.</p>
<p>“You can’t stay here.”</p>
<p>Leonard looks up, startled, to find the flight attendant standing nearby, watching him with serious eyes and a flat, unreadable expression. “I’m sorry?”</p>
<p>“I was just checking to see whether I can offer you any assistance in leaving the aircraft,” the attendant says brightly, his expressionless face transformed by a broad friendly smile. “I’d be happy to call a mobility transport for you, if you like?”</p>
<p>Leonard suddenly realizes that all the other passengers have already gotten off. He’s the only one left, sat stupidly here in the middle of the cabin with his seatbelt still buckled.</p>
<p>He shakes his head, not trusting himself to speak, and quickly unfastens his seatbelt and grabs his bag, hurries toward the door with the flight attendant following attentively at his heels.</p>
<p>That weird-ass book’s got him all fucked up. Maybe he needs a drink after all.</p>
<p>Inside the terminal, he’s greeted with an array of signage: big clear symbols to direct connecting passengers, along with one or two much smaller signs pointing the way to arrivals and baggage claim. Not many of the people passing through are actually here to stay. Leonard’s not either, he doesn’t think. If it’s some nebulous idea of <i>home</i> Jim’s after, Riverside sure ain’t it – Leonard’s confident of that much. He should head right, follow the signs to the nearest departure board or passenger assistance counter and see if he can find any hints about where to book his next flight.</p>
<p>He doesn’t. He turns left instead, walking against the sparse flow of foot traffic until it peters out to nothing, nobody. He wouldn’t be able to explain why, if someone asked him, but no one does. Everyone else has gone to where they’re going, and there’s no one left to notice what he does, or to care. It’s just him, unmoored and drifting, carried along by a dreamy sense of instinctive action – ten years old and wandering barefoot across his grandparents’ backyard with a hairbrush in his hand, not yet forty and reaching out through the cold humming dark of his ship to put Jim’s recorder back in its place – and so he takes another turn, this time to the right. Or was it left again? No, no, it was right, but the next one is left, maybe. Or it will be. That moment hasn’t gotten here yet, so who’s to say, really?</p>
<p>It’s not important. Left, right, straight on till morning – none of it will make a difference in the long run. His path will lead where it leads, and he can only follow it to its end. He doesn’t bother choosing, doesn’t bother thinking about where he’s going, what he’s supposed to do next. He just goes. And why shouldn’t he? He’s tired of choosing, of thinking. He’s tired of his present, this dull flat colorless present without Jim in it. He wants to rewind his own life like an audio file, play back that last morning in their bedroom and do things right this time, hold Jim’s smiling face in both hands and kiss his pretty mouth and the thin fragile skin under each eye and tell him, <i>Jim, you’ve done enough, kid. Stay and rest. Stay with me, please.</i> He wants to find his way back through the paradoxical streets of Yorktown to the long weightless moment between the first kiss and the second, the piercing electric blue of Jim’s eyes, the perfect fit of his love. He wants to walk through the door he’s approaching and find Jim on the other side, smiling or slumped over a cup of coffee or running a brandy-wet fingertip around the delicate crystal rim of his glass, making it sing.</p>
<p>Jim’s not on the other side, though. Not yet. He will be – a roughed-up kid with a bloodstained shirt, swinging his leg over his most treasured possession and tossing the keys to a stranger – but that’s a different moment, one Leonard never got to see for himself, and the light’s all wrong, anyway. It’s too early, the sun not yet clear of the horizon, and Leonard is still standing alone in the murky predawn shadows of the shipyard, keeping his distance from all the fresh-faced youngsters in red uniforms jogging eagerly up the steps of the grimy old shuttlecraft.</p>
<p>God, how he resents their carefree chatter, their clean slates and naïve optimism. He feels ancient compared to them, feels worn down and used up, exhausted by the endless grinding misery of losing everything.</p>
<p></p><div>
  <p>
  <i>“I hate to break this to you,” the kid says, “but Starfleet operates in space.”</i>
</p>
</div><p>He hasn’t decided yet whether to get onboard. Hesitating in the shadows, he changes his mind a dozen times: he will, he won’t, he has to, he can’t. He's near paralyzed by the thought of taking a step so simultaneously uncertain and irreversible, surrendering what little control he still has over his life and casting his fate to the heartless wind, but what else is he supposed to do? It seems to be just about the only option he has left, and the gloom is brightening into day all around him, leaving him exposed. He has to do <i>something</i>. He’s stuck between a rock and a hard place, tormented by his past, aimless and wrong-footed in his present. As badly as taking this wild shot in the dark might turn out, he figures it probably can’t be much worse than spending the rest of his days stewing in his own bitter failure.</p>
<p>So he’ll get on the shuttle. He’ll climb the steps, heart in his stomach, flask in his hand, and make straight for the bathroom, cursing himself and the whole fucking world as he goes. It’ll be the right choice, but he doesn’t know that yet – can’t possibly know that his future is just a few miles and minutes away, newer and better and more than he could’ve ever imagined, bringing the whole universe with him.</p>
<p></p><div>
  <p>
  <i>“Yeah, well, I got nowhere else to go.”</i>
</p>
</div><p>There’s still time to go the other way. What happens then, if he doesn’t get on the shuttle – if he tucks tail and runs like the coward he’s always believed himself to be? They’ll give up on him, most likely, and that’ll be the end of that. He’ll stay where he is, wasting away in the wreckage of every good thing he’s ever had, and he’ll never have the chance to get it right, to make something of himself, to crawl out of the ashes of all his old failures and discover all that bright-wild newness looming over the horizon, just out of sight.</p>
<p>He’ll never find Jim.</p>
<p>Just the idea makes his gut twist. He <i>needs</i> Jim – to follow, to believe in and look after, to surprise him and give him shit and make him laugh and see more in him than he knows how to see. Jim is the one who makes it all possible, makes <i>everything</i> possible, lights up the dark and reveals the limitless unbounded potential of what life and the universe have to offer. Losing Jim would mean losing all of it. Losing himself.</p>
<p>And Jim would lose him, too. Jim, who so badly needs someone to trust, to love, to ground him and take care of him – he’d have to go it alone, the way he always has. Maybe he’d find someone else to stick with him, someone to follow him through bookshops and into caves and off cliffs, to keep his drunk ass out of trouble and rub his back when the nightmares come, to share his unmade bed and fix his every hurt and give him someplace to hang onto, but maybe not. And anyway, he doesn’t need <i>someone</i>, he needs Leonard, exactly him, no more and no less. He’ll tell Leonard so himself, more than once, drunk and truth serumed and sometimes just plain honest, and tell him countless other times without words: in a kiss, in a glance, in the way he clings so close in his sleep, like he’s afraid Leonard will slip away from him if he doesn’t hold on tight.</p>
<p>Jim needs him. They need each other. And they’ll find each other, they will, but they could so easily <i>not</i>. If Leonard doesn’t do this now, if he lets his fear and complacency get the best of him and shies back from taking this terrifying unthinkable plunge into the unknown, they’ll both be lost. Both their fates hinge on this one decision: to stay or to go, to move backward or forward, to choose the rock or the hard place.</p>
<p>What if he chooses wrong?</p>
<p></p><div>
  <p>
  <i>“The ex-wife took the whole damn planet in the divorce. All I got left is my – ”</i>
</p>
</div><p>
  <i>Bones?</i>
</p>
<p>Leonard shouldn’t be here. This moment has already come and gone, gone like the heat of day is gone from the night which follows, as far out of his reach as Jim’s grinning face and the warm weight of hip and thigh flush against his ribs as Jim darted in for one last kiss on the cheek and disappeared forever into the past.</p>
<p><i>The present is all we have</i>, Sarek said – will say – is saying right now, in some other moment, staring out over a rippling landscape of rust-colored sand and rock that looks so much like the home it can never truly replace – </p>
<p>But what if he doesn’t?</p>
<p>What if this present isn’t his to keep?</p>
<p>He feels sick. His breath is coming too fast, too shallow, his stomach is in knots, and that familiar fear is rising up over him again, seeping out of this come-and-gone moment to drag him down into the fathomless dark – oh, but it’s worse, so much worse, because this time Jim’s not here to distract him, to stare at him with those ridiculously blue eyes and argue with him and take his flask with a busted-up hand, Jim’s not here, he’s alone, Jim is <i>gone</i> –</p>
<p>No. No, no, no.</p>
<p>He yanks his bag open, plunges a hand inside, searching blindly with prickly-numb fingers until he makes contact with the flat dryness of paper. He pulls out his book, Jim’s book, the book that will reassure him Jim is still with him, and he opens it up with shaking uncareful hands and –</p>
<p>It’s gone.</p>
<p>It’s <i>gone</i>.</p>
<p>The book, the whole fucking book – it’s all <i>gone</i>. Each fragile yellowed page is blank, wiped perfectly clean, like there was never anything there at all. Like it never existed.</p>
<p>He flips through the early pages, desperate to find that first passage he read, the one that brought him so much comfort, but he can’t find it, there’s nothing there to be found, it’s <i>gone</i>, and then he turns another page and there are words, finally, just six tiny words – no, two words repeated, pinpricks of ink adrift in a sea of blankness:</p>
<p>                                                                  <i>look back</i>
</p>
<p></p><div>
  <p>
    <i>look back</i>
  </p>
</div><div class="center">
  <p>
  <i>                                           look back</i>
</p>
</div><p>“You need to leave.”</p>
<p>He turns and there’s a woman there, short, dark-haired. She’s wearing a high-necked flight crew uniform, a gold arrowhead gleaming over her heart, and she’s frowning, saying:</p>
<p>“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to <i>come back</i> with me to the security office. Civilians aren’t allowed to be…”</p>
<p>The flight officer keeps talking, but Leonard can’t hear her, his ears ringing with those two words she said – the words she <i>screamed</i>, it seemed like, or maybe clanged together like cymbals, loud and percussive, making his teeth rattle.</p>
<p>
  <i>come back</i>
</p>
<p>“I,” he says, barely able to hear himself over the ringing – it’s getting louder somehow, and spreading, throbbing through the nausea roiling in his gut, pulsing in his fingertips. He feels so cold, so <i>heavy</i>. “I need to…sit down…”</p>
<p>The flight officer is looking at him with concern now, reaching out to touch his arm. Her mouth is moving, but all he hears are those two words again, <i>come back</i>, even louder than before. She’s probably offering to bring him to the medical station, and he tries to tell her he doesn’t need a doctor, dammit, he <i>is</i> a doctor, he’s not –</p>
<p>He stumbles, his knees buckling beneath him – staggers sideways into the shuttle beside him, flings a hand out to brace himself on the hull and sees the words there next to his splayed-wide fingers, carved into the grime</p>
<p>
  <b></b>
</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>
    <span class="big"><span class="big"><b>COME BACK</b></span></span>
  </p>
</div><p>and he didn’t watch Jim leave, he didn’t <i>see</i>, because it was too early to be awake yet, even without Jim beside him the pull of sleep was irresistible, and he could have done everything differently but he didn’t – but he <i>promised</i> –</p>
<p>“Sir!”</p>
<p>Leonard gasps in a breath, shockingly loud to his own ears. The ringing has gone silent, all that piercing discordant cacophony falling away at once, and everything is so <i>clear</i> to him now, so self-evident that it’s beyond even his ability to doubt – like he’s been struck by a divine revelation, like he’s sitting on the porch swing of a little white beach cottage with Jim draped across his lap, happier than he’s ever <a href="https://youtu.be/-3u-emDRLh4">been</a>.</p>
<p>The words have vanished from the shuttle’s hull, just the smeared imprint of Leonard’s hand left there in the filth, and somehow he knows that if he opens up the book again he’ll see all <i>those</i> words right back where they should be, pages and pages of them, a whole slew of meaningless rambling words camouflaging the only ones worth reading.</p>
<p>It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t need them anymore.</p>
<p>“Sir?” the flight officer says again, sharp with alarm, and Leonard blinks at her, tries to smile.</p>
<p>“Just a dizzy spell,” he says. “I’m okay. Let’s, uh…let’s go see Security, like you said. My mistake. I guess I must’ve gotten turned around somewhere.” She looks unconvinced, and he puts more effort into his smile, reaches deep for every gram of <i>aww shucks</i> country wholesomeness he can muster. “Really, ma’am. I’m awful sorry to have scared you like that, but I promise, I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”</p>
<p>It’s a lie, it’s all a goddamn fucking lie, but he’ll say whatever he needs to say to smooth things over – because he <i>gets</i> it now, he finally gets what Jim’s been trying so hard to tell him, he knows what he has to do, and in order to do it he has to get the hell out of here, away from this woman, away from Riverside, back to San Francisco and his ship.</p>
<p>He has to let go of the <a href="https://youtu.be/X5Z84qEqr-c">bait</a>.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>♥</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0013"><h2>13. Chapter 13</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>No one's going to read a damn word I put here after seeing that this is the final chapter, but even so:</p>
<p>
  <i>Chapter warning for suicidal imagery.</i>
</p>
<p>See you on the other side.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The wind is louder than he remembers.</p>
<p>Far above, the clouds are a forbidding gray, dense and simmering, shrouding the world below in perpetual twilight. Every few seconds, they crackle with fraying tendrils of electricity – little patches of the spiderweb lighting up one at a time, now here, now there, erratic and unpredictable. There’s just enough light for him to see by, to make out the slick black mud beneath his feet, the infinitely blacker depths of the abyss beyond.</p>
<p>Enough light to see the flower growing there at the very edge of the cliff: a single snowdrop, impossibly pristine, its smooth porcelain petals suspended in a delicate swoon above the mud.</p>
<p>It’s a nice touch. Leonard will have to remember to say so, later.</p>
<p>He reaches into his pocket and pulls out the seashell pieces. It’s too dark to see the color of them, that brilliant iridescent gleam, but he can imagine it well enough. He presses his thumb to the smooth inside curve of one half and thinks about broken things, hidden treasures, the sea-salt taste of Jim’s lips. Promises, and what it means to keep them.</p>
<p>Then he extends his hand out over the cliff’s edge, tilts his palm and lets the pieces tumble together down, down, down into the black.</p>
<p>He looks around him, taking in the details of the present, this single moment in time – the crackling spiderweb, the wind howling through the abyss, the numb tightness of his wind-chilled face, the pretty white snowdrop growing out of the mud – and he wonders how wide it is, how deep.</p>
<p>It’s an idle thought, that’s all. Irrelevant, unimportant. There’s nothing here he would want to keep.</p>
<p>He thinks instead of a different moment: of Jim, beside him again in his hard bunk, curled close in the cold humming dark. Leonard can’t see him, can only barely sense the shape of his body, the weight and the warmth of him, but he knows it’s him all the same, even before he feels the barely-there touch of fingertips skimming over his chest.</p>
<p>It’s unfathomably light, that touch, the very faintest hint of contact, and still it’s so tender, so unbearably intimate that he could weep. He doesn’t, though, he has to focus, has to pay attention to the patterns Jim is tracing on his skin, because they aren’t patterns at all, they’re letters, an O and an M and an E and then they’re words, and it doesn’t matter where he starts because they all end up in the same place, an endless loop of <em>comebackcomebackcomebackcomeback</em>, and he tries to say <em>I am</em> but the words get stuck in his dry cobwebby throat and he tries to reach for Jim but his arms are too heavy, he can’t lift them from the bed, his whole body stiff and cold everywhere but where Jim is touching him, he’s been cold for so long and the humming never stopped, it <em>never stopped</em> but like a waterfall he just stopped hearing it, and Jim keeps writing his letters <em>comebackcomebackcomeback</em> and suddenly the AI is announcing their approach to Xulos and he’s awake and Jim is gone.</p>
<p>Only he’s not; he never was.</p>
<p>The wind whips through Leonard’s hair as he gazes down into the blackness of the abyss. Every atom of his body is screaming at him to back away. He still could, if he were careful about it. He could ease himself away from the edge one cautious step at a time, retrace his own path through the mud, walk back over top of the slip-sliding footprints that brought him here to the sleek black <a href="https://youtu.be/S3YKD_qKVwM">ship</a> that’s carried him all this way.</p>
<p>Sure, he could do that. It’s what any sane person would do.</p>
<p>But he won’t.</p>
<p>He’s done going backwards. He’s been a fool, imagining all Jim wanted was to revisit the past, to laze around in the comfort of what’s already come and gone. Stupid to even consider it, when he knows damn well Jim’s never been a man to retreat.</p>
<p>He’s gone back as far as he possibly can, and now – now he’s finally ready to move forward.</p>
<p>"Okay," he says aloud. His eyes are open, but he’s not looking at this moment anymore, not when there are so many others to choose from, so many priceless fragments of time, unstrung and jumbled together out of sequence:</p>
<p>Jim sprawled sun-warmed and drowsy across his lap, rubbing a freckled cheek against his thigh</p>
<p>Jim’s bite-swollen mouth opening up with a gasp to the press of his fingers</p>
<p>Jim smirking at him across the chess table, tapping his gilded queen against a board already laid with an invisible trap</p>
<p>Jim’s fingers trailing reverently over a finely etched tangle of roots</p>
<p>Jim carefully stripping away an orange peel in one long unbroken spiral</p>
<p>Jim’s big wide dazzling smile as he wipes absently at his eyes with the cuff of his undershirt</p>
<p>Jim looking rumpled and boyish in nothing but a pair of low-slung sleep pants</p>
<p>Jim’s reds standing out in bright contrast to the dark shelves and their rows of faded covers</p>
<p>Jim studying his face with clear, hopeful eyes</p>
<p>Jim’s nails scratching gently at his scalp, lips teasing over that ticklish spot under his chin</p>
<p>
  <em>you didn’t actually think I’d let you crash, did you?</em>
</p>
<p>“Okay,” he says again, and his eyes are burning with tears, the first he’s felt in a long time, but he’s smiling, too.</p>
<p>It <em>is</em> okay. It really is. Because he’s finally remembered the number one rule of life with Jim Kirk.</p>
<p>He takes a deep, deep breath – another – a third – and then he steps forward into the black and lets the wind swallow him whole.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p> </p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>It’s so <em>bright</em>.</p>
<p>He blinks against the onslaught, and the world swims nauseously, shades of blue and gleaming metal and those goddamn bright lights searing his eyes, whiting out the rest.</p>
<p>It’s bright and it’s loud, an unholy racket all around him, whirring humming beeping talking and none of it makes sense, it’s all just noise, sound and fury, signifying nothing, until suddenly there’s a rough urgent voice cutting through the clamor like a diamond-blade scalpel, “Move, <em>move</em> – ” and oh, that voice does mean something, it means <em>everything</em>.</p>
<p>He turns toward the voice, helpless to resist it, the siren song that’s beckoned him across galaxies and through the void and into the abyss, into this cold humming too-bright world of scanners and glinting silver arrowheads and a sharp cramping pain in his neck as he tries to lift his heavy head to search for a hint of command gold, a single strand of hair, all he needs is the tiniest fragment of the whole and he’ll know –</p>
<p>The wall of blue wobbles, splits, parts or is parted to reveal something new: a man, haggard and wild-eyed, white as a ghost.</p>
<p>“Bones?” says Leonard’s ghost, and the last brittle carapace of hurt in Leonard’s chest finally cracks right down the center, breaking him wide <a href="https://youtu.be/WH_UUZHBEq0">open</a>.</p>
<p>"Jim," he says, or tries to say, though the sound gets trapped somewhere along the way, the words sticking in his dry cobwebby throat.</p>
<p>But Jim always knows what he’s trying to say. Jim <em>hears</em> him, even when he can’t hear himself, and so the name itself might get lost in the noise but Jim reacts as though he’s shouted it, his drawn white face going utterly blank all at once – eyes widening, forehead smoothing out, mouth dropping open around some silent response – and then just as quickly crumpling in on itself, and after that Leonard can’t see what it does because Jim is already on the bed, crashing into him like a man falling from a great height.</p>
<p>Leonard catches him, pulls him in and holds him fast with stiff heavy arms that haven’t moved in who knows how long but could never forget how to do this, how to keep Jim close and safe and loved. He squeezes him tight, as tight as he possibly can, buries his face in Jim’s neck where he smells like medbay and stale sweat and knows that this moment is one he’s going to look at again and again: Jim’s weight pinning him down to the bed, Jim’s pulse hammering fast against his lips, the sharp angles of Jim’s bones shifting under his hands.</p>
<p>Jim is squirming against him, scrabbling at his shoulders and his chest, clawing at him – as if he can’t get close enough, as if he wants to open Leonard up and climb inside. He’s shaking so bad it’s all Leonard can do to hang onto him, violent heaving shudders like he’s fixing to rattle right apart, and Leonard realizes he’s been talking this whole time, words spilling out of him in a panicky torrent, “ – didn’t mean to leave you I’m sorry I’m so sorry Bones I love you I <em>love you</em> I didn’t mean to – ”</p>
<p>“Jim,” he says, a little stronger this time, and then again, “Jim,” partly to interrupt Jim’s spiraling and partly, oh, partly just for the sheer simple pleasure of giving voice to it. “’s okay, sweetheart. Jim, hey, ssh, ssh, ’s okay.” He puts his lips to every inch of skin he can reach, Jim’s collarbone and his throat and the curve of his ear – recalls a wish he once made and pulls back, hushes Jim’s anxious whine of protest and tilts his face up with a careful hand to kiss his pale trembling mouth. “<em>Jim.</em>”</p>
<p>Jim sobs into the kiss, a loud awful sound, raw and wrenched-out. It could be relief, or maybe something more painful, an echo of the same fear Leonard heard in the quaver of Jim’s voice around his name, but whatever it is, Leonard takes it from him, draws it out and away where it can’t hurt him any longer and keeps on kissing him and kissing him until eventually he quiets down enough to start kissing back.</p>
<p>Jim’s hands gradually release their vise grip on Leonard’s scrubs, creep up to cradle his face, and they’re cold and shaky but that’s all right, because Leonard’s own hands are steady on Jim’s jaw, his quaking back, and he’ll hold them both together for as long as it takes.</p>
<p>Jim got them this far. Leonard can help them stick the landing.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>“You came back,” Jim says, breathing the words into the slide of their lips, “you came back to me – ”</p>
<p>Leonard doesn’t have the patience to spare for talking, so he answers Jim with kisses instead: kisses him <em>Jim</em>, kisses him <em>yes</em>, kisses him <em>thank you, thank you</em>.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>“How’s it looking?”</p>
<p>Leonard pauses, unsure of what Jim needs from him, until he realizes that he’s talking to Christine, who’s holding the tricorder scanner loudly whirring away by Leonard’s temple – a sound, it occurs to him, not unlike that of a strong wind.</p>
<p>“Good,” she says. She shifts the scanner around to another spot and shakes her head at whatever she’s seeing. “Really good, Captain. Both your readings are excellent.”</p>
<p>Leonard wants to ask what that means, exactly, <em>both their readings</em>, but Jim is smiling and he hasn’t seen that smile in so long, he needs to stay in this moment, to keep as much of it as he can: the flush of Jim’s lips, the pulled-tight apples of his cheeks, the lines sketching out from his red-rimmed eyes. Leonard touches those lines, relearning the shallow arcing furrows of them, and they deepen under the pads of his fingers as Jim’s smile grows.</p>
<p>“Please save your ‘I told you so’s for a later date,” Christine adds archly, except her voice breaks partway through and she’s dashing a hand across her eyes, so it’s not her most convincing show of nonchalance. Not that Leonard has much room to talk right now.</p>
<p>“I’ll keep him in line,” Leonard tells her, and she sniffs and rolls her eyes at him and shoots back:</p>
<p>“I’ll believe <em>that</em> when I see it.”</p>
<p>God, it’s good to see her. He’s been so consumed with missing Jim that he didn’t have room for anything else, but now that he’s got Jim wrapped back around him there’s space for other feelings to sneak in, new-old feelings, like how thankful he is for his head nurse.</p>
<p>And then Jim presses his flushed smiling lips to Leonard’s throat, just beside where those cold fingers have been massaging at the kink in his neck, and the rest of the world falls away again. He was wrong – there’s no room yet for anyone else. There will be, later, but this moment is still just Jim’s: the angle of his jaw under Leonard’s hand, the easy way he lets himself be shifted up and over, the warm kiss-bruised softness of his mouth.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>“You ought to put some real clothes on,” Leonard says, smoothing his hand up and down Jim’s back in slow, methodic passes. Jim has warmed up a bit since he rejoined Leonard under the blanket, but he’s far from the nice toasty personal heater he usually is. Leonard wants him warmer. Wants him lazy-hot and boneless, melting languid into the press of their bodies, comfortable, comforted. He turns his head, relieved to find that the stiff ache in his neck has abated some, and kisses the first piece of Jim he encounters: a little skin, a little eyebrow. “For my sake, at least. It’s like cuddling up to a block of ice.”</p>
<p>“Just woke up and you’re already bossing me around,” Jim mumbles into his shoulder, ostensibly complaining, but in such a soft, dreamy tone that a man could be forgiven for hearing it as gratitude. “Remind me which one of us it is that insists on keeping this place such a meat locker?”</p>
<p>Leonard spreads his fingers wide between the bony wings of Jim’s shoulder blades and holds him close, close, close.</p>
<p>“So,” he says. “The Burgholzlians.”</p>
<p>“Yeah.” Jim shifts back a bit, just enough so they can see each other’s faces. “How much do you remember?”</p>
<p>“Not much,” Leonard says. “Was it…I can’t even think when it would have been. When it started.”</p>
<p>“Well, before Xulos, obviously,” Jim says. “Maybe before Kappa II, but not too much earlier than that, I don’t think.”</p>
<p>Leonard wets his lips and tries not to get distracted by the way Jim’s eyes flick down to watch. “After Piaj?”</p>
<p>Jim smiles, a brand new smile, sweet and nostalgic and reassuring and only the tiniest bit sad. “After Piaj.” He kisses the corner of Leonard’s mouth, lingers there for a long quiet moment, maybe thinking about the same things as Leonard: their little white house, the tranquil sea, seashells hidden in the sand.</p>
<p>“All right,” Leonard says after a while. He rolls a bit further onto his side to face Jim properly, biting back a groan at the tight burning protest in his lumbar region – this bed really is as god-awful uncomfortable as Jim’s always bitching about, though Leonard will be damned if he admits as much to him – and slips his hand beneath Jim’s scrub shirt, rucking it up as he strokes over the long planes of his back. Jim’s safely under the blanket, warmer every minute and mostly hidden from view, though Leonard doubts either of them would care if someone were to walk in and see. “After Piaj, before Xulos. That’s still a pretty sizable window.”</p>
<p>“Yeah. We could narrow it down more by looking at the ship’s records, I guess.” Jim reaches between them for the hand that’s not busy rubbing his back. “They said I was only out for a day or so, but that could have been weeks or months for us. I don’t know that there’s an exact conversion formula. Time was…confusing, in there.”</p>
<p>It was. Especially after Jim was gone. Strange how Leonard hardly noticed.</p>
<p>“So what happened?” he asks, watching Jim toy with his fingers: bending and unbending them, tracing the shapes of his nails. “Who’d we piss off on Burgholzlia?”</p>
<p>“Nobody. Just the opposite, actually. They thought they were doing us a favor.”</p>
<p>Leonard scoffs. “Some favor. ‘Here, enjoy being trapped in your own head for all eternity.’ You’ll forgive me if I’m not racing to send them a thank you note.”</p>
<p>“That’s not how they saw it. The simulation was a gift. To thank us for saving the empress’s life.” Jim answers Leonard’s questioning look with a vague movement of his eyebrows. “Yeah, I barely remember myself. But I’m told it’s the ultimate honor in Burgholzlian society. We were the first foreigners to ever earn the privilege.” He nips at the pad of Leonard’s thumb, a quick painless hold of his teeth. “Lucky us.”</p>
<p>Leonard nudges his thumb against the softness of Jim’s lip. “Still not seeing how it’s meant to be a good thing.”</p>
<p>“It is to them. They were trying to give us <em>time</em>, Bones. Time together.” Jim kisses Leonard’s thumb, and then his other fingertips, one by one. “They honestly did mean well, I think. They just didn’t understand how it would work for us.”</p>
<p>“How was it meant to work, then?”</p>
<p>“Burgholzlians only sleep for like ten minutes at a time, and they’re all lucid dreamers. I’m talking <em>complete</em> awareness and control, without even really trying for it. Even babies have some level of agency in their dreams, and they learn fuller control as they grow up. Like we get taught how to count or write or ride a bike. It’s just another life skill, something any idiot would be able to do.” Jim quirks an ironic brow. “So for them, the simulation is the gift of time. As much time as you could ever want, all in one long uninterrupted stretch. You can live out your wildest fantasies, master a craft, do any impossible thing you can imagine, or just…be together.” He drops a kiss into Leonard’s palm. “But you’re never supposed to forget that it’s this other thing. The <em>also life</em> – that’s how it translates from their language. It’s good, it’s great, it’s this priceless opportunity you’ll remember forever, but you know the whole time that it’s all just make believe. Just one long dream. And then, when you’re ready, you wake up.”</p>
<p>Leonard lets his petting hand come to rest low on Jim’s back. “That easy, huh.”</p>
<p>“Apparently. For a Burgholzlian, anyway. For humans and our flabby untrained brains, not so much.” Jim traces a path along Leonard’s palm, following the curving line around the thenar eminence. “They were all apologies after the fact, but at that point there wasn’t much they could do. It’s kind of a one-way trick. They put you down, make sure the simulation is nice and secure for you, and then it’s up to you to decide when to leave.”</p>
<p>“You didn’t decide, though.” Leonard wraps his hand around Jim’s hip, stroking his thumb along the unblemished skin above.</p>
<p>“No.” Jim curls Leonard’s fingers down over his palm, covers them with his own. “I guess with both of us reinforcing each other’s memories and expectations, our simulation just felt more or less like real life. And real life comes with consequences when you fuck up.”</p>
<p>Leonard thumbs again over Jim’s hip, back and forth, back and forth. Tries to focus all his attention on the smooth heat of Jim’s skin, the small tactile pleasure of that intimate touch, so he won’t think about Jim bleeding out in the mud, the hurt of it, the terror that must have seized him as he drifted in lurching uneasy waves toward consciousness. <em>Something’s wrong</em>, he said, and <em>please</em>, and <em>Bones?</em></p>
<p>“It wasn’t so bad,” Jim says softly. His eyes are bright in the glare of the overhead lights, but they’re focused, alert. “The pain, I mean. Mostly I was just freaking out over…you know.”</p>
<p>He’s lying. Not that he wasn’t freaking out, but Leonard listened to that recording more times than he could count, and each one of those quick-shallow gasping whines have been permanently etched into his heart – healed now, mostly, yet still present, toughened up like scar tissue along the seams of his grief. No, there was never a wound on Jim’s physical body. There didn’t need to be, because as any fledgling med student knows, pain exists in the mind. Jim <em>died</em> down there, a slow struggling death without a drop of sedation or analgesic to ease the way, and he and Leonard are both too familiar with traumatic injuries for their combined expectations to have delivered anything less than a realistic experience.</p>
<p>But it’s such a tender lie, gentle and protective, and Leonard can’t bring himself to call it out. He gives Jim’s hip a squeeze, accepting the attempt at comfort for what it is. “I’m sorry I didn’t catch on sooner. If I’d just gone back to Xulos when I first realized…”</p>
<p>“You <em>hadn’t</em> realized, though. Not really. You knew I was there, and you were picking up on signals that something was wrong, but you didn’t actually get it yet. That’s why your run-in with Sarek ended up being so frustrating.” Jim chuckles to himself, a wry smile pulling at his lips. “I thought the meld idea might help you pull all the pieces together, but man, did I misjudge that one. Only you could get in a fight with your own superego, Bones.”</p>
<p>Leonard groans. “Please tell me Spock doesn’t know. I’ll never live it down.”</p>
<p>“He doesn’t,” Jim confirms, a fair bit more curtly than Leonard would have expected. “And he won’t. It’s none of his business.”</p>
<p>Leonard raises his eyebrows. There’s a story there, all right, but he won’t pry. Not yet, anyway.</p>
<p>It’s the right choice, at least if the kiss Jim brushes against his wrist is any indication. “The point is, you needed to figure it out for yourself. To see the simulation for what it was. To believe it, here.” He lets go of Leonard’s hand and lays his own flat against Leonard’s chest, warm now, cutting through the chill of the crisp medbay air. “I don’t think it would have worked, if you didn’t.”</p>
<p>“If you say so, kid,” Leonard says, for once meaning the words with perfect sincerity. What the hell does he know about any of this? As far as the simulation’s internal logic is concerned, he can only defer to the man who prised him free of it.</p>
<p>Jim rubs an uneven circle over Leonard’s chest. “Besides, it was never really about Xulos.”</p>
<p>Leonard frowns. “How do you mean? The <em>xyrta</em> – ”</p>
<p>“Wasn’t real.”</p>
<p>“Well, sure,” Leonard says. “None of it was <em>real</em>.”</p>
<p>“No – I mean, yes, obviously, but –“ Jim looks into Leonard’s eyes, his expression as serious as Leonard has seen it since waking up. “Bones, I didn’t go through the <em>xyrta</em>. I never even saw it.”</p>
<p>“You were in shock,” Leonard reminds him, privately relieved to have confirmation that Jim wasn’t aware of his fall, that he was spared that terror. Although, in retrospect, it probably would’ve been an easier way to go than the one he got. It didn’t hurt Leonard any, after all. “And your vision was going by that point, you said. But trust me, judging by where I found your recorder, you were right at the edge.”</p>
<p>“No,” Jim says. “I really wasn’t.” Seeing Leonard’s skeptical look, he elaborates: “There <em>was</em> no edge, where I was. No cliff, no abyss. Just more mud, as far out in front of me as I could see.” He takes Leonard’s hand again, lacing their fingers together. “I never fell. I wish you could’ve known that somehow. In a shared simulation, when one of the dreamers wakes up, they just kind of…poof out of existence. That’s what happened to me. I was there, and then I wasn’t. That’s all.”</p>
<p>“But I followed your tracks,” Leonard says, still unconvinced on this point. “They led straight up to the cliff’s edge, and your recorder – I’m telling you, it was right there. Twenty centimeters more and it would’ve fallen in.”</p>
<p>“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Jim says gently. “There was no <em>xyrta</em>. Not until I was gone.” He squeezes Leonard’s hand, a tiny comfort. “<em>Because</em> I was gone.”</p>
<p>Leonard stares at him, mystified. “What? No, I – I <em>saw</em> it. Went right up to it, went down in it – as far as I could, anyway. Lost about a million pieces of tech to it. Something like that doesn’t just…”</p>
<p>“Pop out of thin air?” Jim suggests, with a knowing tilt to his mouth. “You sure about that?”</p>
<p>He’s not. He was, a second ago, but – he’s thinking back to those tense minutes on the bridge, the map up on the viewscreen, the narrow ravine snaking between those two hulking blue land masses, and the expanded version with Chekov’s grav comp calculations, craggy and furrowed and fully dimensional, showing a huge swath of the surrounding terrain. Sure, the map was no more real than anything else, but most of those details aligned pretty well with what Leonard found when he went planetside. He should have been able to see the <em>xyrta</em> clear as day on the screen – a massive plunging chasm like that, opening up a scant hundred meters from the top of the ravine. Why didn’t he see it?</p>
<p>Because it wasn’t there to be seen. Not yet. Not until a different moment – that reeling, spine-chilling moment when he stared down at the sloppy sliding mess of Jim’s tracks and knew deep down in his bones that something was terribly wrong.</p>
<p>Realization searing through his veins like a bolt of lightning, firing him up with white-hot electric panic.<br/>
Slipping in the mud as he ran out from the shelter of the trees, shouting Jim’s name, sick with the fear that he was already too late.<br/>
The abyss yawning wide at his feet, the same vast impenetrable black of a starless void, deep and dark and infinite as the emptiness cracking open in his chest.</p>
<p>“Christ,” he breathes. Of all the crazy shit he’s learned since waking up, this might be the thing that rattles him the most. He genuinely thought he understood this part, but as with so much else, he just couldn’t see the forest for the trees, no matter how hard he looked.</p>
<p>The <em>xyrta</em> didn’t take Jim from him. It <em>was</em> Jim, taken from him – the shattering of his whole goddamn world, a loss so cataclysmic and fathomless that he couldn’t begin to make sense of it, to map its limits or even bring himself to fully inhabit it.</p>
<p>“I don’t understand,” he says, though he does, now, finally – this small piece of things, anyway. But then – “If it wasn’t real, if it wasn’t actually a path to anywhere – I shouldn’t even be here. Why did it <em>work</em>?”</p>
<p>“It was a dream, Bones. Things are what you think they are.” Jim shrugs, evidently unfazed by the paradox of it all. “You believed the <em>xyrta</em> was the way out. So it was.”</p>
<p>That’s too much of a mindfuck for Leonard to process right now. He shelves it for later and turns his attention toward somewhat less ambiguously existential matters. “So does Xulos even exist? Or did we just make the entire place up out of whole cloth?”</p>
<p>“No idea,” Jim says. “Probably not. Or maybe it does – maybe one of us heard the name somewhere – but it’s probably nothing like the one we made up.”</p>
<p>Leonard shakes his head, incredulous. “Unlimited powers of creation, and that’s what we came up with. We couldn’t have just invented a nice resort planet with hot springs and friendly locals, could we? No, it had to be some mud-soaked hellhole with shit weather and guerrilla warfare.” He pinches lightly at the scant flesh of Jim’s flank. “I’ll bet that was all <em>your</em> crazy-ass subconscious, just hankering for an adventure. You feeling itchy-footed that day or what?”</p>
<p>“Hey, don’t look at me. It was like that when I got there.” Despite his quick denial, Jim seems to be actually thinking the question over. “I don’t know, maybe it did have something to do with me – the power of expectations, or whatever. We had that talk the night before, remember? Over chess. I told you about the mission, and you asked if I really thought it was a good idea to pin everything on Spock’s diplomatic skills. That’s why I changed my mind about going down that morning, you know.”</p>
<p>“It is?” Leonard says, surprised. He didn’t know that, in fact. He <em>tortured</em> himself over this question after Jim’s death, at a loss for why Jim would have decided to switch out with Spock at the last minute, and it never once occurred to him that their flippant joking around the night before could have played a role. Jim had brushed off his concern so easily that night, sassed him back and changed the subject not long after; he just assumed Jim never gave the issue another thought.</p>
<p>“Well, not just that. I was thinking about what you said, about whether Spock was really ready to take the lead on this kind of mission. And then I got to the bridge and saw the lightning, and that plus the rain, plus the weird footing we were already on with the Xulosi… I don’t know, I just started wondering if was even fair to send him in my place when this was already shaping up to be a tougher mission than usual. And I thought, man, if this blows up in Spock’s face, Bones is never gonna fucking let me live it down.” Jim offers him a crooked smile. “It’s like you always say, right? Things <em>always</em> go wrong on planets that start with an X.”</p>
<p>Leonard tries to answer Jim’s smile with one of his own, but there’s a terrible thought stirring in his mind, almost too horrifying to contemplate, but impossible to ignore. <em>Things are what you think they are.</em> “Jim, you don’t think…”</p>
<p>Jim needs no further elaboration; he always knows what Leonard’s trying to say. But instead of responding with what Leonard would give anything to hear – <em>no, of course not, don’t be so dramatic, that’s crazy talk</em> – Jim just makes a thoughtful noise. “I don’t know. Maybe. Would kind of make sense, right? Or as much sense as any dream logic does.”</p>
<p><em>No.</em> No, God, it can’t be…</p>
<p>Jim seems to realize then that something is wrong. (<em>Something’s wrong,</em> he said, bleeding out in the mud, dying his miserable frightened death all alone.) He squeezes Leonard’s hand again, brings his other hand up to touch Leonard’s cheek, his brows drawing together in concern. “Hey, what’s up? You okay?”</p>
<p>“It was my fault,” Leonard says, the words like poison on his tongue, acid-hot, eating him alive. How can Jim be so nonchalant about this? “I was expecting things to go wrong – and I got in your head, too. All that shit on Xulos happened because of me. You <em>died</em> because of me.”</p>
<p>Jim looks like he’s been slapped. “Bones, come on, that’s not – ”</p>
<p>“And now,” Leonard continues, unable to stop himself – hating the look he’s put on Jim’s face, but hating himself even more – “now you’re telling me you only went down there in the first place because I – what, <em>guilted</em> you into it? If I’d just kept my goddamn trap shut, if you’d just stayed on the ship like you were supposed to – ”</p>
<p>“There <em>was</em> no ship,” Jim interrupts in a tone that freezes Leonard in his tracks – not loud, but firm, a touch of captain’s steel creeping into his voice. “It was all part of the simulation, remember? <em>All</em> of it – the Enterprise, Xulos, Spock, everything and everyone. None of it was real except you and me.” His fingers slide down Leonard’s cheek to pass over his mouth, hushing him when he would argue back. “So, yeah, if we hadn’t had that conversation, maybe I wouldn’t have gone with the away team. And then what? How long would we have been stuck down there with no clue that anything was wrong?”</p>
<p>“But – ”</p>
<p>“No. No ‘but.’ We were <em>trapped</em>, Bones. And now we’re not. That’s the only thing that matters.” Jim cups Leonard’s face in both hands and forces him to meet his eyes, bright and intense in the stark medbay lights. “Listen to me. Xulos needed to happen. It did. I can’t tell you one way or the other whether your crazy superstition played any role in how things played out there, but if it did, I’m fucking <em>glad</em> for it. You know why? Because it set us free.”</p>
<p>“Jim,” Leonard says helplessly. His hands have found their way to Jim’s wrists somehow, against his better judgment and stricken conscience. He doesn’t feel worthy to touch Jim right now, to clutch at him for comfort like a scared child after the hell he put him through, but he can’t let go, can’t fight his drowning man’s instinct to reach for Jim to buoy him up out of the guilt that’s threatening to overwhelm him. All Jim’s pain, all his frightened helpless suffering alone in the cold black mud – Leonard did that to him. He didn’t mean to, but he did, and that’s something he can never undo.</p>
<p>“I’m sorry I left you,” Jim says, softer now, his voice gone low and small, heavy with his own regret. He tilts in to bring their lips together, just barely, the very faintest hint of contact, as tender and intimate as the trail of his fingertips down Leonard’s chest in the dark. “I’m so sorry, Bones. I hate that you had to go through that. I wish there’d been a different way. But this is the way we got. And I’m not sorry to be here with you, right now, for real.”</p>
<p>“I killed you,” Leonard whispers, heartbroken.</p>
<p>And Jim – his stubborn Jim, who never met an argument he couldn’t dig his heels in on – Jim shakes his head, <em>no</em>. Refusing, as he always does, to yield the point. “You saved me. Saved us both.”</p>
<p>Jim kisses him again, lightly, so lightly: a mere suggestion of pressure, delicate glancing brushes of his lips, slow and restrained. He’s teasing, trying to lure Leonard into taking a more active role, but still Leonard hesitates, torn between the urge to respond in kind, to give Jim what he wants, and the guilt that wants to drag him down, down, down –</p>
<p>And then Jim makes a soft needy sound, fingers curling imploringly against Leonard’s cheeks, and Leonard is neither strong nor cruel enough to hold out on him a heartbeat longer. He slides a hand down from Jim’s wrist to his shoulder, pulls him in close to whatever meager comfort his own body can provide and kisses him hard and demanding, refocusing all his attention on the slick heat of Jim’s mouth and the pleased sighs he’s wringing out of him. Jim is right: this is the only thing that matters. Jim is safe now, safe and happy, nipping playfully at Leonard’s lip to spur him on, relaxed and pliant in his hold, and if Jim can still love him this freely and ungrudgingly then maybe he can – not forget, never that, but he can accept it, at least. Accept that he did a terrible thing without meaning to, hurt the man he loves in a way he’d gladly have died himself ten times over to prevent, and that Jim loves him anyway. Jim forgives him, even if he can’t forgive himself.</p>
<p>If he had the strength for it he’d roll them over, cover Jim’s body with his own and shield him from the cold uncaring universe as best he could, but he can’t manage it yet, and in any case the bed is already chirping at them again, signaling its objection to the uptick in their heart rates like a disapproving chaperone.</p>
<p>“Killjoy,” Jim grumbles, scowling against Leonard’s lips. “You’ve got an override code, right? Tell it to mind its own business.”</p>
<p>Leonard eases his way free of the kiss with a few brief pecks to Jim’s chin and cheeks to temper his petulant resistance. “We <em>are</em> its business. And it’s right. You should take it easy.”</p>
<p>“Me?” Jim pokes him in the chest, a bold gesture somewhat at odds with the gentler touch of his other hand still curved around Leonard’s jaw. “I’m not the one who just woke up from a coma, buddy.”</p>
<p>“No,” Leonard allows, brushing a bedraggled fall of hair away from Jim’s forehead. “You’ve just been chasing me through mine.” He doesn’t doubt that he’s no beacon of radiant good health himself, but his eyes work just fine, and the fact is that Jim looks unwell: thinner than Leonard remembers him, drawn and washed out, his eyes ringed with bags so puffy and sickly-dark they might be mistaken for shiners from a moderate distance. Leonard considers asking when the last time was that he slept, <em>slept</em> slept, or ate something, but it’ll be like pulling teeth trying to get him to answer honestly, and he already knows he won’t like whatever answer he might get. He opts to take a page from Jim’s book and try a more prodding approach. “I’m beat just looking at you, kid. Why don’t you get some rest?”</p>
<p>“I’m not tired,” Jim says, too quickly and defensively for it to be true.</p>
<p><em>Toddler</em>, Leonard thinks fondly, and tries not to give himself away with a smirk. “Oh, now, don’t worry – I’m sure Nurse Jansen would be happy to bring you a nice hot cup of valerian if you ask real nice.”</p>
<p>Jim shakes his head. Grabs for Leonard’s hand, as if he’s afraid Leonard might sneak attack him with a sedative hypo or shoo him off the biobed to go rest elsewhere. As if there’s any chance Leonard will ever let him out of arm’s reach again, for anything, much less to curl up alone on some comfortless medbay cot when he’s clingy and exhausted and staring at Leonard like he’ll vanish out from under him if he so much as blinks. “Not yet. Please.”</p>
<p>Damn. Leonard regrets teasing him now. “All right. Suit yourself.”</p>
<p>He rolls wincingly onto his back and tugs at Jim to follow, satisfied when Jim snuggles in close, thinner than he was but still warm and solid, laying his tousled head on Leonard’s shoulder and hooking a leg over his thigh. Jim’s foot sneaks into a favored spot under Leonard’s calf, a little clammy from being warmed so quickly from its chill. Perfect.</p>
<p>With Jim cozily resettled against him, Leonard decides to come at the question of his wellbeing from a stealthier angle. “You have any sense of how long it’s been? Since you…woke up.”</p>
<p>“Not a clue,” Jim says. “You’ll have to ask Chapel. I’ve been plugged in with you for most of it.”</p>
<p>“Plugged in?”</p>
<p>“Turn of phrase.” Jim taps his temple, where Leonard can just make out a faint pink mark, the fading imprint of where something must have been pressed into the skin. “We had to basically reverse-engineer a way for me to get back in. And it wasn’t perfect, obviously. The Burgholzlians did what they could to help, but the simulation is specifically designed to resist external interference, even from the people who set it up. The only reason I could get as far in as I did was because it was my memories and thoughts and everything that had helped build it all, just as much as yours. But it wasn’t like I could just pop back in. As soon as I was out, the door closed behind me. I never got anywhere close to breaking through all the way.”</p>
<p>Leonard touches the mark on Jim’s skin. Grazes over it with his fingertips, wishing he could smooth it away as simple as that. “What was it like?” He always wondered where Jim really was, the extent of his perception and control in whatever mysterious halfway space he was occupying.</p>
<p>Jim is quiet for a spell, visibly thinking it over. “It was…weird,” he says at last, rather anticlimactically. He play-scowls at Leonard’s expression, swats harmlessly at Leonard’s jaw. “Shut up. I’m working on it.”</p>
<p>“I didn’t say a thing.” Leonard snatches for Jim’s errant hand before it can pinch or flick or whatever other small retribution Jim has in mind. He kisses his clutch of captured fingers, affection sparking through him at the way they unfurl to clumsily caress his chin. “So. It was weird.”</p>
<p>“Yeah.” Jim rests his cheek against the back of Leonard’s hand. “Out of focus, and muted, and…heavy, if that makes sense? I don’t really know how else to explain it. Especially at the beginning, everything was so slow and weighed down. Muffled. And I couldn’t <em>do</em> anything. It was like trying to play a glitchy holo when the program doesn’t recognize you’re there. Or like…” He trails off. “Yeah, like the holo thing, I guess. That’s probably the best way to describe it.”</p>
<p>Unfortunately for Jim, Leonard has loved him too long and too well not to recognize when he’s hiding something from him. He adjusts the arm he’s got around Jim so he can get a hand on his back again. “What else?”</p>
<p>Jim looks away, his mouth skewed into a tight unhappy shape. “Nothing. Forget it.”</p>
<p>“Jim.” Leonard nudges Jim’s jaw with a knuckle, trying to encourage him to meet his gaze. “Tell me.”</p>
<p>Jim tugs free from Leonard’s loosened hold and takes Leonard’s hand between both of his, closing Leonard’s fingers into a fist, feathering kisses against the points of his knuckles. “You’re not going to like it,” he admits, peering up from under his lashes, blatantly angling for Leonard to let him off the hook.</p>
<p>“I don’t like a lot of shit,” Leonard says, and smiles when Jim huffs out a small laugh, reflexive. “Tell me anyway.”</p>
<p>Jim gnaws on his lip, the humor fading from his face. “When I first got back in, it kind of reminded me of being in the warp core.”</p>
<p>Oh.</p>
<p>Leonard’s stomach turns over. He does his best not to show it.</p>
<p>“There was this thing between us,” Jim continues, his eyes fixed intently on Leonard’s face, assessing his reaction, “this – barrier, I guess, between where I was and where you were, and I was just <em>throwing</em> myself at it, over and over again. Most of the time it wouldn’t budge, and sometimes it would sort of…flex, or vibrate, and maybe then something would have slipped through, a feeling or an idea or something, but I couldn’t control it, really. And sometimes it felt like I was almost there, like if I could just get it one more time at <em>just</em> the right angle – and then I’d lose my grip and have to start all over.”</p>
<p>He was right: Leonard doesn’t like this. Jim can try to gloss over it, but the fact that he even thought to make the comparison speaks volumes about his state of mind, and Leonard’s always had a harder time stomaching Jim’s hurt than his own.</p>
<p>Leonard rests his hand at the small of Jim’s back, teasing his thumb over the fine down of hair there. Jim shivers, a tiny ripple of movement that only serves to settle him closer against Leonard’s body, and eyes Leonard in a way that lets him know he’s on to him.</p>
<p>“It wasn’t like that the whole time,” he says, and Leonard knows that’s the last he’ll be hearing of Jim’s early struggles with the simulation. “It got way easier after you figured out something was up. As soon as you realized I was there, everything started adapting to your new expectations. That helped a lot.”</p>
<p>“But I had it all wrong,” Leonard says. “You said so yourself. I didn’t actually get any of it, not till the very end. I had everything backwards.”</p>
<p>“Backwards, forwards – who gives a fuck? We’re here now, aren’t we?” Jim slides his leg still more firmly around Leonard’s, driving the point home. “You got all the important parts. Why should it matter what order you went in?”</p>
<p>Leonard strokes slowly, slowly up Jim’s spine, each vertebra a knobby little miracle under his fingertips. “Beads on a string?”</p>
<p>Jim smiles. “Exactly.” He unbends Leonard’s fingers, nuzzles into Leonard’s palm like a cat asking to be pet. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. You did so well, Bones. <em>So</em> well. You were incredible.”</p>
<p>Leonard obligingly caresses Jim’s cheek. “How much of it were you really there? You said most of it, but what does that mean?”</p>
<p>“I mean, it took us a while to get me in. But after that, I pretty much stayed in the simulation full-time. Especially once I got through to you. Chapel forced me up a few times, but even then I’d just eat a couple nutrient bars to get her off my case and go right back down.” Jim shoots Leonard a guilty look. “I…might have told her to fuck off once or twice.”</p>
<p>“And I suppose you expect me to keep her from making your life a living hell in retribution,” Leonard says, choosing to focus on that rather than on the fact that Jim actually resorted to eating nutrient bars. Leonard has never been able to get him to touch one – but then he’s never pushed too hard, and Christine wouldn’t know not to.</p>
<p>“It’d be nice,” Jim says. “She’s your monster, Dr. Frankenstein. You gave her all this power, and now she’s terrorizing innocent bystanders.”</p>
<p>Leonard fixes him with a <em>look</em>, testing its potency after however long he’s been out. It seems to have kept pretty well, because Jim folds like a cheap lawn chair, surrendering with a put-upon groan.</p>
<p>“<em>Ugh.</em> Okay, fine, I’ll grovel. Put the look away. I know she was just doing her job.” He takes Leonard’s hand back between his own. “She had the worst timing, though. And I knew I’d miss something important if I was gone too long. It’s not like I could give you a schedule of when to expect me. You thought I was always there, and you were doing so well. I didn’t want you to start doubting yourself because I missed a cue.”</p>
<p>“Jim,” Leonard says, struck by a pang of remorse at his own neediness. Wasn’t he the one who begged Jim to help him – to stay with him?</p>
<p>But Jim’s not having it. “No, shut up, don’t <em>Jim</em> me. It was my decision. Where else was I gonna be? I had to get you out, and to do that I had to be in the simulation. Every second I spent anywhere else was a waste of time.” He twines their fingers together, resting them in a knot on top of Leonard’s chest. “I wanted to be there. With you. I really…God, I fucking <em>missed</em> you, Bones. I just wanted to be wherever you were.”</p>
<p>Leonard can’t not kiss him then, so he does, skimming his free hand up past Jim’s bunched-up shirt to tangle in his hair and guide him in. It’s a sweet kiss this time, slow and deliberate, and when it’s over Jim doesn’t pull away, just turns his face to the side and burrows into the join of Leonard’s neck and shoulder.</p>
<p>“They said you wouldn’t wake up,” he says quietly, the words muffled by Leonard’s skin.</p>
<p>Leonard cups the back of Jim’s neck, thumbing over the rhythmic pounding of his carotid pulse. “Who?”</p>
<p>Jim makes a hollow kind of sound – not a laugh or a snort, but something colder, unhappy in a way that digs in between Leonard’s ribs. “Who didn’t? The Burgholzlians. Spock and Chapel. All the doctors we talked to. They all told me the only thing we could do was wait you out and hope you’d wake up on your own someday. Years from now, if we were lucky. A lifetime in the dream – longer, maybe, depending on how it morphed as it went. And even then, you might not ever wake up for real. Not even a Burgholzlian has ever stayed in a simulation that long. They said your mind might not be able to handle it. You might just get lost down there and never find your way out.” He grips Leonard’s hand tight between both of his, presses a long kiss to the side of Leonard’s index finger. “I’m sorry. Fuck, I’m sorry, you just – I shouldn’t be putting this on you right now.”</p>
<p>“It’s all right,” Leonard says, though he’s not sure it is. This idea that’s taken up uneasy residence between them isn’t the sort of commonplace anxiety that can be so easily waved off, vanquished by Jim’s usual formula of overconfidence and outrageous luck or soothed away with the right combination of warm touch and reassurance. No, this is a different breed of terror – darker, less tangible, as deep and vast and unfathomable as a bottomless abyss.</p>
<p>Frankly, it scares him shitless to think that what Jim’s describing could have been his fate: whole lifetimes lost to a miserable false reality, aimless bled-together days and months and years beyond measure adding up to absolutely nothing at all. An infinite expanse of senseless, empty, arbitrary time without Jim – seeking him, wanting him, aching for him <em>endlessly</em>, forever and longer still, without any hope of ever finding him.</p>
<p>Would he have even remembered Jim, by the end? When he finally woke up, if he ever did – would he still have turned helplessly toward the lure of Jim’s voice – thrilling to the sight of Jim’s pale careworn face, consumed by the joy of Jim’s bones under his hands and Jim’s name on his lips – or would he have felt nothing at all? Would he have loved Jim through the measureless lifetimes he endured without him, or would he have lost the pieces of him one by one – the scent of his skin, the wet velvet heat of his mouth, the gentle scratch of his fingers, the weight of his sun-warmed body on a creaking porch swing – until nothing remained but a ghost, a shapeless shadow of memory stirring nothing but a vague sense of something once known?</p>
<p>But, no – Jim is <em>here</em>, right here beside him. Leonard turns away from the fear and into Jim: his hot breath, his steady pulse, his limp medbay-smelling hair, his thigh slanted heavy over Leonard’s. The close press of his chest, and the ever so slightly lopsided clasp of his hands, imperfect and strong. Unbreakable.</p>
<p>It doesn’t matter, really – what could have happened, what might have become of him if things had gone a different way. He loves Jim now, in this lifetime, in this moment just wide and deep enough for the two of them. Jim is his present, and his past and his future too, jumbled up together in any old order they like. The rest is just dreams.</p>
<p>“They were wrong, though, weren’t they?” he says, because Jim has been too quiet and too still for too long, is gripping his hand just a bit too tightly. “Here I am. Wide awake.”</p>
<p>Jim exhales, a humid puff of air against Leonard’s neck. “Yeah. Here you are.”</p>
<p>He draws back some, and Leonard lets him move but doesn’t let him go, just pays out the line a little, unfolds his arm so he can keep hold of Jim’s neck while Jim rearranges himself. He’s not going far, anyway, only propping himself up on an elbow so he can look down into Leonard’s face. His eyes are still the bluest Leonard’s ever seen, in this life or any other.</p>
<p>“I knew you could do it,” he says, low and fierce, and whatever Leonard has done to deserve being the focus of that passion, that unshakable <em>faith</em>, it can’t possibly have been enough. “I knew you’d come back to me.”</p>
<p>The last of that formless black dread falls away, dissolved into nothing in the face of Jim’s conviction. What a silly thing to worry about, after all. As if he could ever lose Jim. Jim is <em>part</em> of him, woven into the very fabric of his identity, rooted deep in the story of him. Leonard could no more lose him than he could lose his own self – and he knows, now, that Jim’s stubborn ass will never let that happen either.</p>
<p>He releases his hold on Jim’s neck, folds his hand over the tangle of their fingers resting on his chest.</p>
<p>“Well, obviously,” he says, rubbing his thumb over Jim’s knuckles, and his heart soars to see Jim’s somber face light up with a surprised burst of laughter.</p>
<p>“Way to kill the moment, Bones,” Jim chides, with a half-assed attempt at a frown which does nothing to disguise the warm glow of delight in his eyes.</p>
<p>Leonard shrugs, mainly focused now on the exaggerated pout of Jim’s lips, weighing his chances of being able to finagle another kiss without having to let go of Jim’s hands. “There’ll be others.”</p>
<p>Jim offers him another brand new smile, tender-bright and dazzling. “Yeah. There will be.” He ducks down close, but hesitates just shy of the mark, the curves of his lips ghosting against Leonard’s as he murmurs: “Hey, so – does this mean you’ve finally come around on the thermostat thing? Because it is fucking <em>freezing</em> in here.”</p>
<p>“Jesus, you really will do anything to win an argument, won’t you,” Leonard says.</p>
<p>Jim laughs again and kisses him properly. It’s a touch clumsy with both of them grinning so wide, more breath and teeth than sweeping romance, their hands still trapped between them in an awkward knot, and it occurs to Leonard with uncommon clarity that this moment, this precise instant in time, is the happiest he’s ever been.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>+</p>
</div><p>Later on, of course, he finds out that there’s more to the story. With Jim, there always is.</p>
<p>Jim has fallen asleep on him by then, tucked up close with his head pillowed on Leonard’s shoulder and one long leg twined securely through both of Leonard’s. His right hand is curled around Leonard’s left wrist, pinning it against his chest, the grip of his fingers surprisingly strong even in sleep.</p>
<p>For his part, Leonard has returned to rubbing Jim’s back with his free hand, luxuriating in the sensation of skin on skin. He’s not at all tired himself, but the low monotone hum of the biobed and the slow rhythm of Jim’s peaceful breathing have lulled him into a sort of half-aware daze, syrupy warm, soft around the edges. His mind is perfectly quiet for the first time in a long, long while, and he’s content to lie with his eyes closed, anchored by the limp weight of Jim’s body, drifting on the rise and fall of his breath.</p>
<p>“Leonard,” he hears, and he opens his eyes to find Spock standing at the foot of the bed, watching him with an expression so startlingly earnest that it just might be verging on real happiness.</p>
<p>“Hey, Spock,” he says quietly, not wanting to wake Jim.</p>
<p>Spock lowers his own voice slightly in response, which Leonard thinks is unusually empathetic of him. “I am gratified to see you awake. I came here earlier today, shortly after you regained consciousness, but I do not believe that you noticed my presence.”</p>
<p>Leonard huffs a laugh. “Yeah, sounds about right. Guess you could say I was kinda distracted.”</p>
<p>The source of his distraction chooses that moment to let out a small sleepy sigh, fingers twitching around Leonard’s wrist.</p>
<p>“Attention hog,” Leonard mutters, and presses a kiss to the top of Jim’s head, not really giving a good goddamn about Spock standing right there watching.</p>
<p>Spock looks sort of strange when Leonard turns his attention back to him – stranger than normal, that is, with a rare hint of the strain that shows only when he’s feeling especially emotionally constipated. Leonard chalks it up to discomfort with the open display of affection, and is frankly pretty entertained by it until Spock suddenly blurts out with uncharacteristic vehemence: “I advised Jim against reentering the simulation to retrieve you.”</p>
<p>“Okay,” Leonard says, drawing the word out. What exactly is he <em>supposed</em> to say to that?</p>
<p>“We argued quite bitterly over the matter, and we have not yet returned to our previous rapport.” Spock glances at Jim, and a muscle twitches in his jaw, which is more or less the Spock equivalent of weeping and gnashing of teeth. “I believe it will be some time before he fully forgives me.”</p>
<p>These two idiots and their pissing contests. Leonard has to put real effort into not rolling his eyes right out of his head, only because Spock does seem genuinely torn up about the whole thing. “Well, he pulled it off, didn’t he? My God, man, just let go of your Vulcan pride for thirty seconds and tell him you were wrong and he was right. Say you’re sorry for underestimating him, stroke his ego some. This ain’t quantum warp theory, here.”</p>
<p>“Unfortunately, our respective positions on the matter cannot be so neatly classified as right or wrong.” Spock folds his hands behind his back. He still has that strange expression on his face, only now there’s a note of something that looks an awful lot like pleading. “You must understand, Leonard: I counseled the captain against pursuing his intended course of action not because I did not wish most fervently for your recovery, but because I believed it was what you would have wanted.”</p>
<p>Leonard arches an eyebrow, unable to work out where Spock is going with this. “You didn’t think I’d want to be woken up?”</p>
<p>That muscle twitches again. “Not at the expense of Jim’s welfare.”</p>
<p>Leonard’s blood runs cold. “What the hell is <em>that</em> supposed to mean?”</p>
<p>“Contrary to what Jim has asserted,” Spock says, an edge of grievance lending some bite to the words, “neither Lieutenant Chapel nor myself had any intention of ‘giving up on you.’ We consulted with a total of eleven neurointensivists regarding your case, including several specialists in sleep disorders and coma recovery, as well as your colleague Commander Culber at Yorktown, who as you know is one of the Federation’s leading experts on neurorehabilitation. Their estimates ranged from zero to a thirty-five percent chance of independent recovery, with those chances diminishing every day that you remained unconscious. However, to an individual, every neurologist with whom we spoke recommended against any strategy that involved attempting to interact with or influence your perceived reality.”</p>
<p>“Why?” Leonard asks, still not comprehending. If his chances of waking up on his own were dropping, of course Jim would have insisted on trying anything he could to help him along. It sounds like one of Jim’s more logical plans, actually, and Leonard is grasping at straws trying to figure out what the medical rationale against it could be.</p>
<p>“Burgholzlian simulations are complex, progressively so, designed to expand and reinforce themselves over time to the benefit of the dreamer. However, this natural evolution is intended to be actively shaped and directed by one or more self-aware participants.”</p>
<p>“Because they’re lucid dreamers,” Leonard interrupts. “Jim told me all this already.”</p>
<p>Spock’s eyebrow creeps upward at a telling angle. “Even so, I hope you will allow me to fill any gaps which may remain in your understanding of the situation,” he counters evenly. Leonard waves a hand – <em>be my guest</em> – and Spock continues: “Being unfamiliar with the neurobiology of any species but their own, the Burgholzlians were ignorant of the idiosyncrasies of the human sleep cycle, particularly its role in memory consolidation and emotional processing. Compounded by their incorrect assumption that humans shared their own ability to naturally assume conscious control over the unconscious realm, this misunderstanding resulted in a grievous failure to predict how you and the captain would engage with the simulation.”</p>
<p>He still isn’t saying anything Leonard didn’t already know or couldn’t have guessed, but Leonard nods, encouraging him to keep going. He’s clearly driving at something, and the sooner he gets there, the sooner Leonard can help him move past whatever’s got him so knotted up and get back to his nice pleasant doze.</p>
<p>“You are of course aware, Doctor, that the human mind perceives the dream state as reality by default, and furthermore that it abhors dissonance in all forms.” Leonard nods again. He’s a practicing neurosurgeon with a degree in psychology; he’d sure <em>hope</em> he understands such rudimentary concepts. “Then you will also be aware that, in accordance with these principles, irregularities within a dream such as the distortion of spacetime or the conflation of familiar locations typically go unnoticed or are rationalized and reinterpreted to better suit the present narrative. Even external stimuli such as sounds or physical sensations are often incorporated into the dream itself so as not to disrupt the sleep cycle.”</p>
<p>“Right,” Leonard says slowly. The whirring of what he now knows were scanners which he kept hearing as wind or some routine system of his ship, the incessant humming of the biobed disguised in a dozen mundane ways, the neck and back pain and sensation of heaviness that he invariably chalked up to whatever excuse came most readily to hand, his apparently infinite repertoire of justifications for the relentless chill – he thought it was cold on <em>New Vulcan</em>, for God’s sake – yeah, he’s starting to see where this is going.</p>
<p>“Dreams have always presented an intriguing paradox for Vulcan scientists and philosophers,” Spock says. “They exist only in the mind, and yet they are by their very nature illogical, impervious to reason and rational judgment. Above all, they are self-preserving, a quality which was greatly amplified by the imposed stability of the simulation. Because of this, we were advised by all parties, Burgholzlian and Federation alike, that any proactive intervention would not only fail to improve your chances of regaining consciousness, but in fact could easily activate a defensive response within the simulation in which your mind intensified efforts to rationalize away inconsistencies and reduce cognitive dissonance, which in turn would have significantly worsened your prognosis as your constructed reality became increasingly resistant to external stimuli.”</p>
<p>Leonard mulls that over. It makes sense, but – “Jim made it out, though. You knew it could be done. I mean, sure, I get what you’re saying, but people wake up from dreams all the time, don’t we?”</p>
<p>“The captain’s awakening was highly fortuitous. His ‘death,’ such as it was, was unpremeditated and relatively swift, and it occurred early on, while the simulation was still establishing itself in both your minds. Even so, it was apparent that his relatively brief stint in the dream state was not without lasting emotional and psychological impact.” Spock hesitates. “He was…not himself, when he awoke.”</p>
<p>(That tinny, panicked voice on the recording – <em>no, no, please</em> – caught between worlds, fighting with all his might against the pull of true consciousness. Desperate to stay. <em>Bones?</em>)</p>
<p>“The convergence of factors which facilitated his emergence from the simulation was so unlikely as to be irreplicable,” Spock says. “It was, as you might have termed it, a ‘one-shot deal.’ You had always demonstrated a distinct aversion to the types of risks which could result in a spontaneous premature death of a similar nature to the captain’s, and the simulation was growing increasingly entrenched, making it more resistant to both internal and external challenges – which, as I have said, increased the risk that any intervention would have the opposite effect of what we desired.”</p>
<p>Typically Spock would be looking all smug and pleased with himself by the time he’s reached this point in an argument, but even after laying out each scrupulously logical element of his case he’s still wearing the same pinched, gloomy hangdog expression he started with. Leonard decides to take pity on him. “Look, I get it, Spock. You had to weigh the benefit against the harm it might cause. I’ve been there, believe me. It’s okay. Consider yourself officially off the hook.”</p>
<p>“Thank you, Doctor,” Spock says gravely. “I am grateful for your ability to empathize with my dilemma. However, we have not yet fully addressed the core point of contention between myself and the captain.”</p>
<p>“Which is?” Leonard says, maybe just a hair less patient than he was at the start of this conversation. He <em>is</em> getting tired now, mentally at least, and he’s had about as much of all this complex talk of ethical quandaries and existential peril as he can stomach for one day. He’s started to wish he’d feigned sleep when Spock first arrived.</p>
<p>“The captain proposed to circumvent the simulation’s innate self-preservation mechanisms by targeting the emotions underpinning conscious thought – an appeal to pathos, if you will. Rather than directly challenging your understanding of your constructed reality, which might trigger a defensive response, he would seek to exploit the memory-driven nature of human dreams and guide you via a series of emotional cues, drawing heavily on your shared history and mutual attachment. Your reactions to these cues would shape your thoughts and perceptions, in turn transforming the simulation. In this way, he believed, you yourself would actively construct the narrative which would ultimately induce you to voluntarily leave the simulation.”</p>
<p>All this long-winded dancing around the point is giving Leonard a headache, not to mention the most disconcerting case of déjà vu he’s ever had in his life. Spock has more in common with his pa than he may care to admit. Or, wait – no, it must be that Leonard’s idea of Sarek was more a reflection of Spock than he realized. Goddamn backwards dream logic; Leonard’s still not fully free of it. “Spock, I’ve had one hell of day. Or…however long it’s been. Mind skipping to the part where you explain the glaring flaw in all this? Because so far it sounds pretty damn smart to me. And it got the job done, didn’t it?”</p>
<p>“It did,” Spock acknowledges. “But that success was far from guaranteed when the captain announced his intention to extract you from the simulation in this manner – or, indeed, at any time after. His strategy required intensive emotional engagement on both your parts. Because the simulation had initially been created from his mind as well as yours, he stood the greatest chance at being able to successfully manipulate it, and his facility with navigating your emotional landscape could not be matched by anyone else. However, these very qualities which granted him a small chance of success in freeing you from the simulation conversely placed him in grave personal danger of the opposite. He aimed to serve as your anchor to reality and to draw you out through strategic leveraging of that connection, but he was himself unanchored. You were his only focal point, and if you responded unpredictably to his emotional cues, or if the simulation’s internal logic became compromised as a result of his interference – as did in fact transpire on multiple occasions over the course of his endeavor – ”</p>
<p>The bed chirps, calling out Leonard’s rising heart rate. Spock glances at the biofunction monitor, but before he can comment, Leonard gestures impatiently for him to continue. “Just hurry it along to the point, would you? If you try and leave me hanging now, so help me God, I <em>will</em> find a way to climb out of this bed and strangle you.”</p>
<p>“Your hyperbolic profession of violent intent is both implausible and counter-productive to the problem at hand.”</p>
<p>“The <em>point</em>, Spock.”</p>
<p>“The point, Doctor,” Spock says, and Jesus, there’s that déjà vu again, “is that it was not only for your sake that the neurologists we consulted advised against the captain’s intervention – perhaps most passionately in the case of Commander Culber, despite his personal investment in your recovery. By engaging so uninhibitedly with the simulation from which he had only recently emerged, Jim placed himself at unacceptably high risk of being reassimilated. If the simulation became compromised, he could easily have found himself unable to navigate his own way back to consciousness, and even if he were willing to be drawn back permanently into your shared simulation, which I believe he was, the odds were far greater that he would have found himself trapped in the liminal state he occupied during his efforts to retrieve you, neither fully submerged in the perceived reality of the dream state, nor responsive to any external stimulus. The adverse psychological consequences of prolonged confinement in this state would most likely have been both severe and irreversible.”</p>
<p>Jim stirs at Leonard’s side, and Leonard realizes that his hand has gone still, fingertips digging into Jim’s back in a way that can’t be comfortable. He forces himself to let go, to return to his rhythmic petting, and Jim settles instantly, breathing out another soft sigh.</p>
<p>“You’re saying he could’ve scrambled his brains in there.”</p>
<p>Spock nods, for once accepting a new idiom without comment. “Indeed.” He looks at Leonard with dark, regretful eyes. “I was wrong, Leonard, as you say – but until the very moment I received word of your revival, I truly believed you were beyond our help. I did not wish to lose Jim as well.”</p>
<p>Leonard rolls his head back against the pillow and exhales, trying to breathe out some of the fear that’s crawled back into his belly. He could have <em>really</em> lost Jim, lost him in a way there’d be no getting him back from. He doesn’t know who all they consulted on his behalf, but Hugh’s not exactly the wait-and-see type. If even he was advising against intervention, the risk-reward balance must have been unconscionable.</p>
<p>“Dammit, Jim,” he mutters. He wants to shake the kid awake, drag him out of sleep – real sleep, the kind he’s been doing without for God knows how long – and demand to know how he could’ve been so goddamn stupid.</p>
<p>He doesn’t, though. He thinks again about Jim’s terrified voice on that recording, calling out for him as the whole world collapsed around him. He thinks about Jim’s haggard white face crumpling in on itself, and about the awful sound that wrenched out of him when Leonard kissed him. He thinks about Jim’s fingertips against his skin, barely making contact, begging over and over and over again for Leonard to come back to him.</p>
<p>He thinks about the vast, rock-solid hurt he carried in his chest for so long, and about lying in bed staring up at the ceiling in his assigned quarters, cold and unmoored and so utterly, incomprehensibly alone in the universe.</p>
<p>He thinks about all that, and he thinks about what Spock is saying, and he tugs Jim’s sleep-heavy body a little bit closer and keeps on rubbing his stupid, reckless, idiotic back.</p>
<p>“You were right, Spock,” he says. “For whatever that’s worth. You did exactly what I’d have wanted.” He looks at Jim, curled along his side. His ghost; his way forward; his limitless, impossible man. “Good thing this jackass never listens to either one of us, I guess.”</p>
<p>Spock smiles – a real, honest-to-God smile, crow’s feet and everything. “Yes. A very good thing.” He takes a step back from the bed. “I will leave you to rest. Do you anticipate that you will be amenable to receiving additional visitors tomorrow? There are many people who are eager to see you.”</p>
<p>“Sure.” Jim lets out another trailing wisp of a sigh, and Leonard pauses, considering. “Probably. Ask me again before you start putting the word out.”</p>
<p>Spock dips his head in assent. “Of course.” He glances at Jim, a shadow stealing over his face again. “Perhaps I should limit the frequency of my own visits while you are both recuperating.”</p>
<p>“Oh, don’t be an idiot,” Leonard says. “I get that you two aren’t on the best of terms right now, but you’re as good as family to each other. And family fights sometimes. Doesn’t mean you just throw in the towel at the first sign of conflict.”</p>
<p>Spock looks uncertain. “I do not wish to impose my presence where it is not wanted.”</p>
<p>“It’s wanted,” Leonard says firmly. “I get a say in this, don’t I? And besides, Jim’s no good at holding onto a grudge. Me, I could’ve made a career out of it if this whole medicine thing had fallen through – ”</p>
<p>Spock permits himself another faint smile, as Leonard was hoping he might.</p>
<p>“ – but Jim’s different. It’s that insufferable propensity for seeing the best in people. He gets mad and then he moves on. I mean, shit, he forgave you for dumping him on Delta Vega, didn’t he? Right quick, too. And he didn’t even <em>like</em> you then, if you’ll pardon me saying so.”</p>
<p>“I am relieved to find that your talent for combining compassion with insult appears to have survived your ordeal,” Spock says dryly. “Nevertheless, there is a measure of truth to what you say, though the circumstances you seek to compare are not perfectly analogous. Most saliently, we are both aware that Jim is far more invested in your wellbeing than in his own.”</p>
<p>Leonard can’t argue with that. But he also can’t help but think of the Spock he knew in the simulation, created from his memories and Jim’s, their combined perceptions and convictions about him: his reckless and unsanctioned decision to lead an extraction team down to Xulos, his stubborn insistence on continuing the search for Jim well past the point that logic dictated they should give up, his ready support and undisguised concern any time Leonard turned to him for assistance.</p>
<p>“He thinks the world of you, Spock. You can trust me on that.” Leonard prudently leaves out his own side of things. Jim’s the one Spock needs reassuring about; if he needs to know Leonard’s stance on him so bad, he can pull on his big boy drawers and ask. “He’ll get over it, I promise you. This’ll all blow over, and you two will be back to conspiring against my blood pressure and getting yourselves into Lord only knows what kind of trouble again before you know it. Me and Uhura are the ones who should be worried. You and Jim, you’ll be fine.”</p>
<p>“Thank you, Leonard,” Spock says, every bit the staunch, complex, quietly considerate man Leonard and Jim jointly dreamed into existence in the simulation – and yet more, of course. Just like Jim, and life itself, and everything else in the vast unbounded galaxy. “It is highly agreeable to share your company again. Your absence has been…most conspicuous.”</p>
<p>“<em>Conspicuous</em>, is it,” Leonard scoffs, though curiously he finds it a good deal harder than it should be to match the tone with an appropriately scornful expression. Must be the post-coma fatigue. “All right, get out of here, you old sap. You and all your weepy carrying on. Land’s sakes. It’s enough to make a man sick.”</p>
<p>“Very well,” Spock says, his eyes gleaming with humor. “I would not wish to hinder your recovery.”</p>
<p>“And stop worrying about Jim. I’ll work on him for you.”</p>
<p>Spock raises an eyebrow, but wisely keeps his thoughts to himself, limiting himself to another nod of acknowledgement before turning to leave.</p>
<p>The door has just slid shut behind him when Jim stirs again, his leg shifting restlessly between Leonard’s. “Bones?” His voice is small and hazy, tinged with unease.</p>
<p>Leonard strokes down his back, a slow settling sweep of his hand. “Yeah, Jim.”</p>
<p>Jim relaxes against him, the first sneaking hints of tension slipping away as quickly as they set in. He rubs his cheek against Leonard’s shoulder with a hum of satisfaction, wriggles his toes where they’re pressed up against Leonard’s ankle. “Hi.”</p>
<p>Leonard’s face <em>aches</em> from smiling. “Hi.” He curves his hand around Jim’s flank, taut and vulnerable in the cradle of his palm. “Go on back to sleep. I’m not going anywhere.”</p>
<p>“Mmm, ’kay.” Jim readjusts his grip on Leonard’s wrist, his fingertips settling into the groove between bone and tendon. “Thanks.”</p>
<p>Leonard loves him like this. Loves him always, in every moment, cocky and demanding and reckless and sarcastic and sultry and bullheaded and just a little too impressed with his own cleverness, and loves him in a particular kind of way when he’s just like this, gentled and trusting, honeysuckle-sweet. He draws his hand up Jim’s side, slots his fingers into the spaces between his ribs. “What for, sweetheart?”</p>
<p>Jim nuzzles his shoulder again, real slow, already most of the way back to sleep. Leonard has just about given up on getting an answer out of him when he breathes: “Coming home.”</p>
<p>And with that, he’s out, his mouth gone slack against the pale blue of Leonard’s scrub top, his lashes laying still and feathery-dark on the smooshed-up curve of his cheek. It’s a pretty enough sight that Leonard doesn’t even mind the near-certain likelihood of drool in the hours to come, or how his arm is already going numb from the weight of Jim’s head on his shoulder, his fingers prickly with the start of pins and needles. That’s okay. It means Jim is here with him, where he belongs. He always has been.</p>
<p>He lays his cheek against Jim’s hair and closes his eyes, goes back to listening to the steady cadence of Jim’s breathing. This is all he cares about right now: the rhythmic whisper of each inhale and exhale, Jim’s warm body tucked into the curve of his arm, Jim’s fingers latched tight around his wrist like he’ll never let him go. He’d stay in this moment forever if he could.</p>
<p>But he can’t, and that’s fine. There are lots of other moments ahead of him, and Jim will be in those, too. The important ones, anyway. The ones worth keeping.</p>
<p>Leonard will likely drop off himself soon, and when he wakes up Jim will still be cuddled against him, right where he’s meant to be. Maybe he’ll be awake too by then, and he’ll smile when Leonard opens his eyes, run his fingers through Leonard's hair and scratch gently at his scalp and kiss that fiendishly ticklish spot under his chin, and this time Leonard will pull him closer, hold him tighter, make him swear that he’ll leave poor Christine out of things going forward and bring Leonard along on all his away missions instead.</p>
<p>Christine herself will be back at the start of whatever shift she’s working these days, and Leonard will hold Jim to his promise of apologizing to her, though he probably won’t have the heart to make him really grovel. He’ll get all the details from Christine about his condition and Jim’s, how long he was out, what exactly it was that Hugh and the other neurointensivists said during their consults, and he’ll wrangle Jim into keeping still while he runs his own scans on him, just to be sure. Jim will kick up a fuss about it, as always, but in the end he’ll let Leonard run all the tests he wants, dutifully submitting to every poke and prod even as he condemns Leonard for a sadist, both of them comforted by the familiar routine.</p>
<p>Spock will return, and others will start trickling in, Uhura and Scotty and Sulu and Chekov, all those beloved faces Leonard hasn’t seen in even longer than he realized. It’ll be good to see them again, to ground himself still more firmly in the details of his real life. Based on what he heard from both Jim and Spock, he suspects there may be some lingering acrimony between Jim and the others – has to wonder if Jim cussed them all out half as bitterly on this side of the simulation as he did on his – and as happy as he’ll be to reunite with his nearest and dearest there’ll be no question of his priorities, so if things start feeling awkward he’ll claim exhaustion and kick them all out so he can bundle Jim close again and see if he can’t discover a new smile or two.</p>
<p>Jim has dropped some weight he can’t much afford to part with, looks and feels sharper along all his beautiful lines and angles than he ought to, so Leonard will have to see to it that he eats properly. Jim will try to weasel out of eating his greens, and Leonard will swindle or strong-arm him into it anyway, and they’ll both agree that the so-called meat magicked up by the medbay replicator is a decent effort but could never be mistaken for the real thing.</p>
<p>Jim will complain every chance he gets about the hardness of the biobed and the outrageous scarcity of pillows, and Leonard will roll his eyes and call him a princess even though the damn thing really is a backbreaker and he’s already planning on asking Scotty’s assistance in designing a more ergonomic setup for inpatient use.</p>
<p>He’ll make Jim explain the plot of that nonsense book, which may well have saved his life but which he still can’t make heads or tails of regardless, and hopefully at some point Christine will clear them to stagger over to the head for a full-body sonic to improve upon the patchy cleansing of the nursing handheld, but even if that never happens and the two of them end up coated in the kind of grime you could plant radishes in Jim will still be the loveliest thing Leonard’s ever laid eyes on, and even if they work up the kind of stink that’d fell an elephant at twenty paces he’ll still kiss him every goddamn chance he gets.</p>
<p>In time they’ll be released from medbay, and they’ll return to the captain’s quarters, to their soft wide bed with its intricately carved headboard and its rumpled navy sheets, which Leonard will insist on changing for reasons of hygiene and mites and basic human decency, and also in no small part so that he can tumble Jim down onto them immediately afterward to remind him just how quickly a neatly made bed can be wrecked.</p>
<p>They’ll settle back into their quarters – and they will be <em>their</em> quarters, officially, because Leonard will finally tell Jim to have the quartermaster reassign the CMO’s rooms, give them to Christine or whoever is next in line, whoever would appreciate the extra space and the personal replicator and the water shower that’ve been going to waste since the day they moved onto this ship – and make the most of that off-duty time together, however long it lasts. Jim will ramble on about shit Leonard can’t half make sense of while they’re having their morning coffee, and Leonard will talk Jim through letting go of his hard feelings toward Spock and the rest, and Jim will beat Leonard soundly at chess whenever he so pleases and thoroughly distract him when his pleasing lies elsewhere, and every night they’ll climb into their unmade bed together and fall asleep in each other’s arms, and neither of them will ever want anything more.</p>
<p>Eventually they’ll both be cleared for duty, and Jim will take back command from Spock while Leonard will return to his own daily routine: dealing with the fallout of whatever nonsense those two idiots get themselves tangled up in next, letting Christine get away with far more than he should, sharing knowing looks and the occasional post-beta dinner with Uhura, joining everyone for after-shift drinks in the Deck 12 observation lounge, chasing Jim into caves and off cliffs and all over God’s creation to discover the tiny treasures hidden out there in the dark.</p>
<p>And after that – well, hell, who knows? That’s still over the horizon, out of sight. There’s no telling what the future holds, especially where Jim Kirk’s concerned. All Leonard knows for sure is that they’ll get there <a href="https://youtu.be/q9BV5eI_QSA">together</a>.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>1) The Burgholzlians' simulation was obviously heavily influenced by both the <a href="https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Nexus">Nexus</a> from <i>Star Trek Generations</i> and the simulation from one of the best Star Trek episodes of all time, TNG's <a href="https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Inner_Light_(episode)">"The Inner Light"</a>. (And also a tiny bit by <a href="https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Ship_in_a_Bottle_(episode)">"Ship in a Bottle"</a> - TNG really loved itself some existential musing!)</p>
<p>2) Major props to those of you who guessed before the end that it was really Jim trying to save Leonard. While I had to wave you off with vagueness at the time, please know that your comments and messages made me beam, do a little victory dance, and occasionally mutter to myself, "Oh, they're <i>good</i>." (While I was tremendously impressed and excited by all of you, special mention must go to Riptide, who went digging for clues after having an <i>aha!</i> moment late in the story and left a comment on Chapter 11 that made me scream multiple times.)</p>
<p>3) I don't want to totally spoil the fun for y'all in identifying clues, but just to get you started, a few notes on dream symbolism:</p>
<p>+ Large bodies of water are commonly accepted to represent emotion and the greater state of the unconscious mind.<br/>+ The vast majority of people can't read properly in a dream, which is why the supposedly Standard book from Xenafi'i is "word salad," and why Leonard struggles so much with the naked little book aside from the quotes Jim is pushing through to him.<br/>+ Speaking of which, let's talk about that <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1s4J_bCv3cHO5HWYoDRCF5n3Q95y8Noe7h3UzFEeydLs/edit?usp=sharing">bookshelf</a>.<br/>+ A brief primer on <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U_81Dh4xEZhknK01E2L5P_pU1ZMA1E_5VlA-48KRcF0/edit?usp=sharing">plant symbolism</a>. (It didn't seem at all odd to anyone that Terran flowers kept popping up around the galaxy, huh?)<br/>+ <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ArcNumber">Ahem.</a></p>
<p>4) As promised, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0tC3Z2zQyJLeruVwfGfUl6?si=065e7fa5378d4f05">here's the complete playlist</a>, which I ask you to please not share with anyone who hasn't finished the story yet. (That's also why I gave it a different name - I don't want people hunting for it before they're done!) I'm curious if you notice any additional nuance about some of these choices now that you know the deal.</p>
<p>5) We're not quite done here yet, as there are a few one-offs I have planned or semi-finished, and no doubt I'll end up spinning up a few more in response to some random ask or comment. But this is the end of the main story, one I started three and a half years ago and have put a frankly embarrassing amount of time into since. I am beyond grateful to you, Reader, for sticking it out this far, whether you're reading these words on the same day I write them or at some moment in the splendidly unknown future. Y'all are the best readers I could have ever asked for, and your reactions, questions, theories, and encouragement have such tremendous impact on me and on the stories I write. Thank you for coming along on this journey with me. I adore you.</p>
<p>♥♥♥</p>
        </blockquote><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Feel free to come hang over on <a href="https://fireinmywoods.tumblr.com">Tumblr</a>!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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